What is SEO?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a marketing discipline focused on the growing potential in search engine results that are organic. Organic means non-paid. Search Engine Optimization consists of having a professional website, and great blogs/articles with keywords that will encourage high ranking on the search engines. There are a plethora of aspects to SEO that range from the words on your page to how other sites link to you on the Internet. SEO encompasses the creative and technical elements required to increase awareness, drive traffic, improve rankings, and drive traffic in search engines. They do have guidelines for businesses to follow, they use analytics, and they do give penalties to companies who are using shady business practices to try to get high search engine rankings. Nevertheless, search engines must have professional websites and great blogs and articles with certain keyword density to determine how websites are ranked. Additionally, search engine optimization is also about having a better site for visitors. SEO can be done by many helpful agencies like Gilbert SEO.

Why SEO is so Important

While social media and other marketing tools can assist in bringing more traffic to your site, search engines are the ultimate when it comes to driving traffic to your site. SEO brings in passive leads. The main commercial search engines include Google, Yahoo, and Bing. And with these search engines and others, people will type in keywords that are relative to what they are looking for in the search query. Because of this it’s important that they would be able to find you in the first few pages of the search engines, and not deep down in the search engine pages. You must make sure to use a certain keyword density in your site and in your content to make sure search engines can find you. Even though search engines do have the capability in crawling throughout the web to determine what your and others sites are about, they don’t have the capability to crawl to determine on a deeper level what your site is about. Also, without using the search engines and using them effectively, you will be missing out on tremendous opportunities in gaining an astronomical amount of traffic to your site, compared to just a small portion with other marketing methods. And lastly, if you don’t effectively use search engines, your site can be listed deep down in the search engine, in which hardly anyone ever go to. Most people would check only the first few pages in the search engines.

When getting started with SEO, certain questions must be addressed:

1. Are you doing it yourself, or are you hiring a consultant?

Now that you know the importance of SEO and what it is about, you can write down a clear list containing your goals for the SEO campaign. Doing this is the first step in utilizing SEO effectively to reach your objectives.

Then you must determine whether or not you are going to do this yourself, or hire a SEO professional. The first step in determining this is quite easy: Determine whether you have more time and less money, or if you have more money and less time. It’s quite obvious that if you have more time and less money, you should do this yourself. And because attending to an SEO campaign is time consuming, it would be in your best interest to hire someone. Hiring a proficient and competent professional would run you around several hundreds to several thousands of dollars. However, if you do hire a SEO professional/marketing professional, you must still check in and attend to the SEO campaign sometimes. These professionals still need your input sometimes, and it’s important to make sure everything is up to par in reaching your goals.

2. Will there be others within your company assisting in the SEO campaign, or are you doing it all by yourself?

If you decide to do the SEO campaign yourself, now it’s time to determine if others in your company will assist in this project, or if you are doing all by yourself. If you are doing it yourself, then you must do the blogs, redo the website, and other
things. However, if you are having others in your organization to participate, you must make sure you choose the ones who have at least some knowledge on the matter. Secondly, you must designate what each party would do in this SEO campaign. And of course, review their work to make sure everything is going accordingly.