When working on websites, a very common term that comes up is SEO. So what exactly is SEO?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. SEO is simply designing pages on your website to increase visibility when people search for products or services related to your business. The more terms that are on your website that are related to those searches, the higher up in search results your website will appear, leading to more people visiting your website.
Google and other search engines use bots to scan web pages and collect information that they store in an index. From there, algorithms analyze indexed pages and rank them based on several different factors (whether or not the business is running paid ads, whether or not they’re using relative terms, etc.).
Based on the ranking, they then determine the best order to display them to the people searching. This helps to deliver the most relevant information and makes the search for that information a little easier.
Let’s think of SEO in terms of a bakery.
The bakery itself would be the internet. Each of the different baked goods would be the index of different pages. When you come into the bakery and ask for chocolate chip cookies (your Google search), the baker would be the algorithm, thinking of the different baked goods they have, then the cookies that they have, and then more specifically the chocolate chip cookies. (Is anyone else feeling hungry?)
The baker is likely to offer you the more expensive cookies first (these would be the paid ads) because they will make a little bit more money with the sale of those cookies.
They may have other types of chocolate chip cookies – like ones with walnuts or gluten-free options – but because your search was simply for “chocolate chip cookies”, these are the ones that will be shown first, with the other options offered later or further down on the list.
When designing your website, if we use the bakery analogy, you want to make sure that your chocolate chip cookies are the ones offered first! To do that, you need to be sure that the different aspects of your website are related to what your customers want.
Make sure to include verbiage that is as close as possible to the terms that your customers are using when searching for your products or services (these are called keywords). There are different tools available to look up popular search terms for any product or service.
This explanation of SEO is the (very) simplified version. There are a lot of other factors that contribute to your rank in search results like social media, links from other websites, and other marketing activities. The first and easiest step is to make sure that your website has what customers are searching for.
For help with your website and SEO, contact Muldrow Marketing’s expert SEO team today!
