Way back when the information super highway was getting it’s very first addresses some really smart people realized that just because the address existed didn’t mean anyone could actually find it and so entered the idea of a search engine. In 1996 a couple of geniuses named Sergey Brin and Larry Page started a project to create a “search engine” which would later Google, the most widely used search engine. As website owners realized they could be making money from their sites, they started to try and figure out how to get websites to show up in search results, thus the principles SEO were born.
According to Wikipedia SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, the process of affecting the visibility of a website in a search engine’s unpaid results. Of course one could always pay for first page results but that can seriously add up, pay-per-click and adwords can get really expensive really fast, but that is a whole other post. Un-paid or “organic” search results are the objective of the search engine optimization process, which has two primary components;
On page optimization, which is the process of making sure Google can find your web pages and that the content relevant, detailed and helpful to the phrases that your target audience is using for their searches.
Off page optimization, which includes getting other sites, that have authority within your industry, to include information about your site and include links to your site, also known as link building.
Since search engines are designed to weigh and measure websites based on what people like the most, and this does not mean likes from Facebook but rather visits to your site, the more people visit your site from search results the better it will perform in these result. In other words getting a website to rank on first page of search results can be on the tricky side, it involves clearly understanding your target audience, making sure all webpage content is relative and that all this relative content is easy to find on your site.
If you need help in your SEO campaign contact Online Presence Builders to see how we can help you.