Search Engine Optimization - Stay Ahead in the Competition

The internet is largely responsible for globalization and has improved the way of doing business to a great extent. It has helped to bring down the market boundaries, pushing businesses in every sector beyond any limits. It doesn’t matter whether you are a small-scale or a large-scale business, you can use the internet to create an unmatched brand-awareness and define your own market.

This online platform has a great potential and is easily accessible to every business in the market. To use this platform to their advantage, it is mandatory for companies to have their own website. On a different note, how is a website going to give you an upper hand over your competitors? Is having a website enough for improving your online presence?  Before moving on to answers, let’s first understand the importance of these questions.

Consider this - you have to get dental implants and so, you end up searching - “Dentists in Colorado” in your search engine. Each Search Engine has its own secret algorithm which it uses to decent websites from the crappy ones. So, you get pages of results relevant to the keywords you used in your search. Various surveys state that more than 80% of the customers/users never go to the second page of these results and most of the times, the user clicks on one of the first five search results.

Therefore besides having a website, you have to make sure that your website is one chosen by a user and for that, you have to ensure that the ranking of your website is decent enough for it to be visible to the user. As already mentioned, search engines use their own secret algorithm to rank websites and display them accordingly in their search results. How to improve your website’s ranking in these search results? The answer is - Search Engine Optimization.

What is Search Engine Optimization(SEO)?

In simple words, Search Engine Optimization or SEO is the process of driving traffic to your website. This traffic only covers the users directed through the “natural” or “organic” search results but doesn’t include the users directed through the paid links/ads on the top of any search result. Now, the obvious question is - If the algorithms used by various search engines are never disclosed, how does Search Engine Optimization work?

The recipe or algorithms used by various search engines are not a secret but also are updated at regular intervals. Search Engine Optimization is NOT a shortcut, but an array of healthy practices designed after studying various search engines. Before starting with various techniques for implementing Search Engine Optimization, a free advice for you. Ensure that your website is properly designed and optimized from a user’s perspective. This includes the type of fonts used, color combinations, navigating options, and such other things on your website.

Here are a few ways in which Search Engine Optimization or SEO is implemented

Backlinks and Interlinks

Interlinks are the links which refer to different web pages of the same websites or websites in the same domain. Backlinks are the links to your website from a website in some other domain. Search Engines look for interlinks and backlinks to check for a website’s relevance. Providing interlinks is not a difficult task but creating relevant backlinks matters more to a search engine. There are several ways of creating backlinks and one of the most used ways is - Guest Blogging. Become a guest blogger for different websites(the more popular, the better) and create backlinks to your website.

Relevant Content

As already mentioned, SEO is not a shortcut method that will improve your website’s ranking in a day. Even if you don’t pay heed to other techniques of SEO, the relevance of content on your website matters. The priority of any search engine is to provide their users with a list of results which are most relevant to the keywords of their search. So, keep updating your website with relevant content to improve SEO and increase traffic to your website.

Keywords

Use keywords relevant to your product or services you provide. This is done basically from a user’s perspective, which is - What keywords will a user use to look for my product or services? Or what is the domain of problem/s that my product or services solve? Using keywords is a healthy practice until they are over-used. Stuffing keywords is not good for your website and a search engine can label your website irrelevant if it suspects any type of keyword stuffing.

These are just a few ways to implement Search Engine Optimization. Announcing results of a survey, Search Engine Land states - “Only 44 percent of businesses spend time or money on SEO. That result is pretty surprising, if not inexplicable.” So, there is a chance that your competitors are not using SEO for their website. Stay ahead in the competition by hiring SEO experts now!