What is SEO?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a marketing discipline focused on the growing potential in search engine results that are organic, in which organic means non paid. Search Engine Optimization consists of having a professional website, and great blogs/articles with keywords that will encourage high rankings on the search engines. And 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. 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. If your site would be deeper in the search engine, it would not be found by most people because most people are not willing to search that long.
When getting started with SEO, certain questions must be addressed that include: Are you doing it yourself, or are you hiring a consultant; and will there be others within your company assisting in the SEO campaign, or are you doing it all by yourself. If you are going to hire a consultant, you must make sure he/she/the company is experienced and reputable. Good ones are also expensive because SEO is in great demand these days. Other than that, one red flag that a SEO consultant is not what he/she is cracked up to be is when that person contacts you first. With SEO being in so much demand these days, they wouldn’t have as much time to contact you first especially if they have tons of clients working with them in which case would happen due to their great services. A SEO consultant who is not new to the business and yet contacts you first might not have as much business because of substandard services.
If you are doing it yourself, keep in mind that SEO is complex, but learning the basics to start can still take you a long way. And it’s vital to keep updating, keep checking periodically on search engine and new information, and to add more knowledge about SEO. Another thing to be mindful of during the SEO process is that it’s imperative to be patient because the learning process and implementation takes some time. It also takes even more time to start seeing positive results, like two to three months. And then, it may take a year or two in building your site in which the search engines can trust enough for a high ranking. Nevertheless, the sooner you start the process, the better off you will be. And lastly, the SEO is an ongoing process. It is never done once and that’s it. As mentioned above, you will periodically check, update, gain more knowledge, and get updates.