It’s all about the website rankings!

For most people, unless you truly just want to have a website to direct your clients to when they ask – most of us want to have our website work for us. And that is exactly what we are going to be discussing in this blog! So grab a pen and paper, and join us for what we think will be a fun and educational adventure to learning about how to optimize your website!

The first thing that you should know is what SEO stands for. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. Essentially this means how well your site is optimized for the search engines when they do their crawls for the ranking of websites. Every eight weeks or so, the search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo etc) do what is called a “crawl”. This is when they scan the internet for websites and determine who has content that is loaded with keywords and is continually putting up new content. Many people make the crucial mistake of having a beautiful site designed, they may create an “about us” page and then they walk away and become frustrated that their website never generated leads. Well, my fellow readers, the reason for this would be because there was no content on your site to generate leads from! Which leads us to our first point for improving your SEO:

• It’s all about the content. It is crucial to update your website on a regular basis with new and fresh content. If you think that this is to much work for you, then consider hiring out the work. Let’s paint an illustration of how this works: Google scans your site a few weeks after it goes live, you are excited about your new site and therefore have created a bunch of great content for it and have been constantly adding to it – therefore Google recognizes that you are putting work into your site and rewards you by ranking you higher than others who are not adding to their site. A few months go by and you get busy, you forget all about your website. Just because you forgot about it doesn’t mean that Google has, therefore because you haven’t added new content when the search engines do their crawls, your rankings will go down. Moral of the message: keep adding content and keep updating your site.
• It is all about keywords. Keywords are what people use when they are searching for products or companies similar to yours. It is worth your time and effort to figure out what keywords people are using to get to your site. In addition, make sure that these keywords are being used at the beginning of each page – this is important for the search engines.
• Contrary to what many would like to believe, pictures do not count as content for websites. Pictures don’t contain data that would help lead people to your site, so if you are thinking that you updated your site because you put up some new pictures, well, that is good, but it won’t help your rankings!

So here we discussed the preliminarily basics on what search engines look for and how they rank websites. Be sure to check back for our next blog as we go into more detail and give you more tips as to how to improve your websites search engine optimization!