After you’ve started your business and put yourself out there on digital media, you may begin to hear a common phrase over and over again, especially with your website – SEO. Most small businesses or clients that have websites created have heard of SEO. It stands for Search Engine Optimization. However, many people only know what it is, not what it consists of, and how it can drastically affect your online presence. So, we asked a Montreal SEO expert to give us the lowdown.
What SEO is In a Nutshell
Search engine optimization is a way to maximize your visibility when it comes to how search engines spider, display, index, and rank your website. All of the major web pages will rank your pages based on what each search engine considers the most relevant to a search phrase. It is a free marketing tool that allows you to get your business higher ranked.
What are a Couple Factors that Affect SEO
When it comes to search rankings, quality content in your website is the new key factor that major search engines search for. When the internet first came about, it was not uncommon to use what is now considered “black hat” methods to increase your search result rankings. Aside from this, many things like keywords in the HTML tags of your page, title tags, and description tags, as well as having what is called “keyword spam” (which is now considered a black hat SEO tactic and is frowned upon and punishable by search engines) was common. But today, search engines have optimized and changed their algorithms, so they rely more on the quality of your work, and some keyword optimization to take place in order to get your website up there on the list.
Some Things Can Impact Your Rankings Negatively or Positively
Other factors that can enhance your SEO, but aren’t limited to: typos on your website, reviews of your business, alt tags for images (all images SHOULD have an alt; we’ll explain this in a minute. Another thing that is super important is content placement. Just because you have bold words on your page for example doesn’t mean that those “key words” you emphasize on your page will be counted on Google. As a matter of fact, Google will probably ignore them. Aside from having quality content, you want to ensure that content research and keyword research is done properly to make sure you have what you should on your page. The content and use of your keywords, freshness of popular search terms, content relevance to your business, and if your website can directly answer “questions” because some people still type in a question sometimes in search engines in search for answers.
Conclusion: Search Engines Don’t See What We See
As this article mentioned earlier, ensure that all content has alt tags, and text that can be readable if not displayed on your page visibly. What a search engine sees is the text that is on, and embedded into tags on your page. Therefore, every image should have an alt tag. Search engines may see header tags, but they don’t see “bold” text versus normal text, which is also important to remember. Also, if you use any black hat SEO tactics, your website ranking on a search engine will actually fall more and more until the issue is fixed. Sometimes a business may have to pay someone to fix this, but having some knowledge of SEO will help. And contrary to popular belief, just because you researched everything you can think of on SEO, unless you are a webmaster who has actually successfully achieved number one results on numerous occasions, you may want to have someone else look at the SEO of your business’s website in order to make sure your rankings are on top.
