Ready or Not, Here I Come, Google
We understand how important your website is and the time, effort and money that goes into creating it. So naturally, once your site is live you want it to show up in search results. But, how do I do that?…
Search Engine Optimization
SEO, is a strategy for improving your site’s rankings in search engine results. Generally, the higher a website ranks on the search results page the more frequently it appears in the search results list.
Search Engine Basics
- Crawling – This is the process that search engines use to discover new content, looking over the code/content for each URL they find.
- Indexing – How search engines store and organize the content found during the crawling process. Once a page is in the index, it’s in the running to be displayed as a result to relevant queries.
- Ranking – The ordering of search results by relevance.
What determines SEO rankings
There are many factors that determine your website’s ranking, the following is a very brief overview of some of those elements:
- High quality content – Relevant and useful information targeted towards your intended audiences increases site traffic, which improves your site’s authority and relevance
- Keywords – These are the words and phrases that searchers enter into search engines. (It can take up to a year to get ranked for specific keywords and even after you are ranked, it will take continued time, effort, and money to maintain that rank. SEO companies can try and promise to get you to the first page of search engine searches, but more times than not, it is for your business name only and not the coveted keywords.)
- Great user experience – Simple, logical navigation makes a site easier to use. This helps the user complete their task in less time with less confusion. If users are having a great experience when visiting your site, you’ll be rewarded with higher rankings.
- Meta Tags – Bits of code that help search engines understand the content on a page, so they’ll be able to show the website in the appropriate results. A good meta description will attract users to click through and visit your site.
- Links – Inbound and outbounds links indicate quality content, credibility and authority
Other tips to improve my SEO
- Claim your Google My Business profile
- Send an e-blast once your site goes live (if you have a customer list) and let them know you have a new site. Share the link with them to get them to your site and drive traffic to it.
- Post to your social media channels about your website and link them back to the site to drive more traffic.
While updating these items on your website will help to boost your rankings, getting listed at the top of search engine results pages takes time and consistency (it takes 30 – 60 days for a new website to show up in search engines.) Finding the right strategy to get there depends on your business/organization’s marketing needs and the goals you want to achieve. wisnet has some great tools to assist you or we can connect with our SEO partner for more advanced needs.