SEO or search engine optimization can be a little intimidating and confusing. This post explores SEO and explains how search engine optimization works.
On the one side of the street there is special coding called meta data which is installed into the websites head tag. This can be found in code view but not able to be seen by an online viewer, only a search engine can read this. The meta data tells the search engine about your business like, business name, address, location, keywords (what someone would type into a search engine to find your business) and other meta data, there are about 50 tags that can be used. In addition there are your social networking tags known as open graph (Facebook tags) and Twitter Cards (Twitter tags) and search engine verification tags, which is received when a website becomes registered with Google, Yahoo and Bing. The more information you “tell” a search engine the easier you make its job and will yield higher organic page rank.
Every 24 hours all of the major search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc. send out spiders that crawl the world wide web (www) looking for meta data and and something known as a robot.txt file which is installed in a website’s root directory. This robot file tells the search engine how to ready the website site map (we will discover what a site map on the other side of the street). Why are they looking for this data? A search engines main function is to deliver search engine page results (SERPs) and the more information a website “tells” the search engine the better organic page rank will be achieved.
On the other side of the street we create something known as a indexing which is sending a site map to all of the major search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo. This process includes creating the site map which is just that in a format known as extensible markup format (XML) that is “read” by a server or person . Then this map gets sent to all of the major search engines and tells them here is what my website looks like. For the best results recommend daily indexing is recommended so that the sitemap is sent to all of the major search engines every single day.
These two actions including the search engine spiders crawling the web looking for your website and the site map getting sent to the major search engines will produce results so that when someone searches for your services, business or products you website will have prime placement on page one. It is all about how much information your website shares with the search engines. Make it easy for them to identify who you are will yield you more online leads and the opportunity to turn the leads into customers. It is a known fact that more and more people do an online search and if your not on page one it is like you are invisible to them online.
The amount of time that this takes for a website depends on several factors which includes, how competitive is the industry? how old is the domain name?, does the domain name contain something about the business? (i.e. larryssandwiches.com – Larry sells sandwiches so he uses that specific item in his domain name). Typical rule of thumb for an industry which is not very competitive would say within 3 to 4 months you will find your self on page one of all the major search engines. Something more competitive like say bail bonds, or insurance, can take up to 8 or 9 months even up to a year.
This is the basic explanation of how search engine optimization works. In addition to on page organic optimization as described above there is also something called off page optimization that is equally important, but that is another blog post. Have questions? We’re happy to help out, drop a line to Molly at molly@designright4u.com and will be happy to answer any of your SEO questions. Hope you found this article helpful.
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