SEO is all over the place today – whether you’re writing an article to go to Ezine, an “about us” page to go on to someone’s website or even posts on your own blog, everyone wants to make sure they’ve incorporated SEO. Before we talk about the grave importance that SEO has when it comes to online content, let me give you a brief description about SEO.
The world has become quite a globalized one. Businesses don’t compete with others within national boundaries anymore. The doors to international business have been thrown wide open in most countries and business carry out their operations all over the world. But just because a business based in San Francisco is allowed to conduct business in New Zealand doesn’t mean that it physically sets up an office at the other end of the world. This is where the internet comes in.
Why do businesses need websites?
The internet has become a virtual marketplace – a market where businesses from all over the world communicate with other businesses from all over the world. Like all businesses need physical marketing to let people know about them, they need virtual marketing to let the world know that they exist too. How else can they gain customers if the world doesn’t know that they exist, that they have any services or products to offer and that they’re good at their job? In the virtual marketplace, a company or business’ identity is established by its online face or its website.
Now add to this the fact that every business has competitors, and with globalization, these competitors have only increased in number. So like any two good salesmen of two companies would do, the websites of these companies need to outshine each other. Outshining each other doesn’t mean that one needs to use flashier colors and larger fonts. It means that they need to show up higher on the list of results that a search engine brings up.
The search for a service
As a customer looking for a service, say a content writing service, you are probably going to go to Google or Yahoo or Bing and type in the words ‘content writer’ in the search box. What comes up then is a list of firms and individuals who can offer you the service you want. Have you wondered why someone comes up on the third position in a search result and why someone else on the seventh?
That, is the result of SEO. SEO or Search Engine Optimization has everything to do with ensuring that your website or blog or any online content for that matter comes up higher on the result list of a search engine. A popular method has always been to use keywords, words that people are likely to type into the search box when looking for a particular service, while composing the content for your web page. So if you’re selling baby nappies, your website will have a lot of usage of the word ‘baby’ and ‘nappy’. How will that be of any use, you ask?
How search engines work and why SEO is in such demand?
Google’s search engine is not a dormant one, neither is Yahoo or Bing. Their crawlers are busy scoping out all the websites available online at regular intervals and making a database; and when someone types in a bunch of keywords, they dive into that database and pull out websites that mention those very keywords. The more the keywords, the higher the page will show.
The basic need for SEO is due to the human habit of not really pressing on the button that says ‘next’ at the end of the page of search results. The first ten entries or at the very maximum, the entries on the first two pages of search engine results are the ones that get looked at – so you need to make sure to be on that first page.
For that, you need to make sure that your website is search engine optimized. It’s a rough world out there. If you’re not among the top few, you’re likely to go unnoticed; and the craving for attention has made SEO the new motto for success. The right SEO agency will help you do all this and more.
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