What is SEO and Why Do I Care?

I often get clients who want a web­site built and when I start talk­ing to them about SEO, they glaze over. They just want a web­site. And from it, more business.

SEO stands for Search Engine Opti­miza­tion and sim­ply put, it’s what gets your web­site found on Google, Yahoo, Bing and the like. If you want your cus­tomers to find you online, you need it.

SEO is part art, part sci­ence. Search engines are con­tin­u­ously cat­a­loging the inter­net. Each has its own unique algo­rithm that places empha­sis on dif­fer­ent parts of your web­site to best serve up what their users are look­ing for. Know­ing what’s impor­tant to search engines, what’s impor­tant to your poten­tial clients and the lan­guage to express it is key to good SEO.

Build­ing in SEO

There are many ele­ments that go into cre­at­ing good SEO. This is by no means a com­plete list, but the basics include:

• Your URL
• Site title
• Page title
• Head­ings, used in descend­ing order
• Links in and out
• Image titles, descrip­tions and alter­nate text
• Size of your website
• Unique con­tent
• Con­tent freshness
• Key­words and meta data

Some of your SEO is buried in your code, but most of it is vis­i­ble to the viewer. When cre­at­ing good SEO you need to think like your poten­tial customer.

For exam­ple, if your com­pany is called Per­snick­ety Painters and some­one keys Per­snick­ety Painters into Google, your web­site is going to come up on top. But what if some­one who’s never heard of you wants to find a top qual­ity painter in San Fran­cisco, CA? They’re going to key in ‘house painter in San Fran­cisco, CA’ or some such phrase. Your job is to antic­i­pate what your cus­tomer is going to key in, and have a page ready that meets their search requirements.

That means your site title might be San Francisco’s Top Qual­ity House Painter: Per­snick­ety Painters. And your home page might include a tes­ti­mony by a client stat­ing that Per­snick­ety Painters offered the best qual­ity house paint­ing for the price on their home in San Francisco.

Next, as the owner of Per­snick­ety Painters, you would cre­ate a Face­book page and a Twit­ter account for the busi­ness with links to that page.

To keep con­tent fresh, you’d include a blog and post reg­u­larly about the lat­est homes you painted in San Fran­cisco, CA.

And so on…

Choos­ing the right lan­guage and express­ing it through­out your site is key to cre­at­ing good SEO. It’s what brings you new busi­ness. And isn’t that what every busi­ness owner wants?

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Need SEO help? Shim­min Design offers basic SEO with your web­site design and part­ners with SEO experts when in-depth SEO is required.