[vc_row][vc_column][sm_column_text]You can have the best, most wonderful or most expensive website in the world but if you haven’t given any thought to SEO – search engine optimisation – you might as well not bother.

What’s SEO
SEO is an abbreviation of Search Engine Optimization. This is the process of structuring a web page so that it is found, read, and indexed by search engines in the most effective manner possible. Today, most people visit Google or another search engine to find what they are looking for. Most of us only look at the results on the first page of the search results. So, if your website gets on the first page of these search results, you can be sure to have a lot of visitors.

Why is SEO so important
But, how does your website gets on the first page of the search results? Well, that’s where SEO becomes important. It’s not enough to just write an article or page and wait for visitors. Unless you have a very popular blog or website, you will not get any visitors. So you’ll have to optimize your blog (or website) and content to get higher in the search results. Why is this important? Consider what it would be like if no one could easily find your place of business, or even your telephone number. Most businesses could not continue for long in such a situation. The same thing can happen with your web site if people cannot easily locate it.
“Wait!” you say. “I had a web site created, and the address is included in all of our advertising. Why wouldn’t people be able to find it?”
Certainly, existing customers or those who are already familiar with your company should be able to find your site without any great difficulty, but this may not be the case. Can you be sure that every potential customer has been reached by your advertising? What about the people who don’t read the magazines or newspapers where you chose to place advertisements? Did they hear the right radio station? Did they get one of the thousands of brochures you mailed? So, what about the search engines? Those people could just enter a few words into a text box, click a button, and voila! There is a link to your web site. Aren’t search engines wonderful? Yes, search engines can be wonderful, and the scenario above can happen, but not without some work. This is where SEO comes in.

A case in point
Let us consider first a web site that I know of which is extremely difficult to find. This particular site is for a fine restaurant in the community where I live. I didn’t know the address of their site, so I went to Google.co.uk, entered the name of the restaurant into the text box, and clicked the search button. Many links were listed, but none seemed to have anything to do with the restaurant. To the search terms I added the name of the city where the restaurant is located. Here were links that did pertain to the restaurant, but they all seemed to be links to news articles and reviews, not to the site of the restaurant itself. What was wrong? Did they actually not have a site? Luckily, one of the news articles did mention the web site address. It is a very beautiful site, pleasing to the eye and ear. Why did I have so much trouble finding it? I think it might have something to do with the fact that the creators of the site don’t seem to understand SEO.
SEO is the tool that can be used to insure that your site is listed as close as possible to the top of the relevant search results.

The foundation of a successful SEO program consists of the following building blocks:
Keyword-rich text. The majority of a site’s pages should contain the words and phrases the target audience types into search queries. Pages should appear somewhat focused on these important keyword phrases, and the phrases should be featured prominently on the page. Otherwise, the page won’t convert well or receive consistent search engine traffic over time. Keyword research and copywriting for individual HTML tags are a part of this building block.

Information/site architecture and page layout. Search engines and end users must be given easy access to keyword-rich content. How text, graphic images, and multimedia files are arranged on a page tells search engines and site visitors which content the site owner believes is most important. URL structure and technical architecture figure into that as well.

Link development. Commonly referred to as link popularity, this is the number and quality of objective, third-party links pointing to a URL or Web site. Of course, not all links pointing to a site are objective, third-party links, but those types of links aren’t always the most credible.

Social media promotion. Never underestimate the power of social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. These two sites can give drive a significant amount of traffic to your website. These sites are also perfect for extending your link building and promotion strategies. It is now a common notion that having profiles on these social media sites determines a business’ online existence.
You must remember when processing SEO works:
Building up your business takes effort and you are working on it all the time. Website’s SEO is the same way. You need to always keep working on it. SEO is a continual process, not a one time event. If you want a top ranking, you will need to always be working on and investing in your website.[/sm_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]