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Friday, August 31, 2012

Search Engine Optimization: So How Does it Work?

By Ralph Burns


To succeed in promoting your business online, all of it begins with an attractive, effective and "search engine friendly" website. Without having these 3 factors, it'll be extremely hard for everyone to find you and your business online.

Of all the three factors though, the most important so that you can improve your business online is to keep your website "search engine friendly" - and that all starts with search engine optimization or "SEO" for short.

Unfamiliar with SEO? Actually, most of us have no clue how major search engines find out which websites rank at the top and which are totally ignored. If you're unfamiliar with the way it all works, you are not alone!

To put it briefly, search engine optimization or SEO is the art and science of making your website as easy to locate by the search engines as possible. And when you're making it easy for the search engines to find you...then your potential clients find you as well.

SEO is arguably THE most important element when it comes to setting up a profitable and successful online presence because without it, it doesn't matter how awesome your site or how earth-shatteringly amazing your product or service is, if nobody can find you in Google, then it's all for nothing.

How Does SEO Really Work?

Well lets say you're a dentist in San Mateo, California and you wish to grow your business. As a dentist, potential people searching for the services you provide may type in such words as "san francisco dentist" or other such terms into major search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing.

In an ideal world, your site would appear on the first place ranking in Google for both of those "keywords" that your potential customer has typed in. If your website pops up on the first page of the Google search engine, your potential clients will be very likely to find you and know about your dental services:

However if your business website is not listed on the first page of search results, then potential customers are going elsewhere for their dental services. As a result, they'll have a really difficult time finding your site and learning with regards to what you do. The truth of the matter is, the last time YOU did a search on Google for anything, when did you ever go to the second page of search results? If you are like most people, probably very rarely, if at all.

The aim then, is to get your website on the first page of Google. That's where all the traffic and money is simply because very few people search deeper than page one.

Also the higher your business website shows up on page 1 the better. In addition, it's been shown that for people who are searching for local business services online, 61% of them make a buying decision on that search!

Now more than ever before, it is very important for businesses to have excellent exposure on the major search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo.

The major search engines, like Google look at both factors to find out what website they will "serve up" when someone enters a keyword like "san francisco dentist", "toothache", "beanie baby" or "how to lose weight". Each time a person type in any of these keywords into the search box, the search engine (and Google is the best with this right now) combs the internet in a millionth of a second to serve up the webpage or website they deem is most relevant and authoritative for your search. This is how you get to the top of the search engine results.

When you combine "relevance" with "authority", you will have a magical formula for success with getting your website and your own individual web pages to the first page of Google and the other search engines.




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