SEO stands for search engine optimization, and it works by helping your website rank on major search engines, such as Google.
By using a number of best practices, SEO professionals make websites more friendly to both users and to the search algorithms that decide a given page’s score. Because the major search engines are constantly being updated and there is still a lot of undisclosed information about them, SEO is a field that is quite research intensive. While some fundamentals have been unchanging for decades, other major components of SEO are very recent. Understanding how to balance these is another major part of SEO practice.
How search engines work and how to optimize your site for them
To gain a better understanding of how SEO can work for your website, it can be helpful to paint a picture of how the search engines themselves function. When you type a search query into Google, it is able to deliver relevant search results to you by taking the following steps:
- Before you perform your search, Google has automated computer programs, or bots, that are constantly crawling the entire internet.
- Believe it or not, Google’s search bots are actually attempting to index everything that is on the web. That’s why search engines require massive data centers.
- With every site crawled and indexed, Google can then use an algorithm, or set of instructions, that uses more than 200 unique factors to score pages based on your individual search.
So the first part of SEO is ensuring that your site can be easily crawled and indexed by Google and other search engines. Many websites do things that make themselves effectively invisible to search engines, which can hurt rankings even if you have the best content.
From there, an SEO strategy should be based on knowing who your target user is and what they’re searching for. Once again, you can have the best content, but if it isn’t relevant or useful to your audience, you won’t rank for searches in your field. Once this is understood, SEO professionals can start to worry about specific ranking factors such as linking, keyword density, readability and properly formatting content.
SEO done right requires expertise
Like many areas, it can be easy, and important, to grasp the fundamentals, but it can take much longer to fully master the details. That is why so many organizations turn to a specialized SEO partner.
At Burg & Co., our experts have a depth of SEO experience to help you reach your goals. We’ll work to understand your audience and business needs and develop a search strategy that not only drives traffic but also converts to leads and sales on a cost-effective basis.
Ready to learn more? Contact us today and schedule a free marketing consultation.
