Seo stands for search engine optimization. This is the process of making search engines better at finding your website. In order to understand how SEO works you must first understand how search engines work. Popular search engines like Google and Bing use web bots to hunt down and catalog various websites. These aren't actual robots, but algorithm codes that go from page to page and link to link, then bring their findings back to the search engine's database.
There are a number of ways to help make your business website optimized for search engines. First, let's making sure you have a business profile with google. Chances are you already have a business profile, but if not it's free to set up with google. Here's the link to the google business page: https://www.google.com/business/. Fill out every field. You might want to save all of the information you are using to populate your profile in a document you can easily access for later. This will help with your next step.
This makes you visible on google, but you will need to repeat this step with other online directories. The process of going to other online directories and populating your business information is called building citations. There are several free ones like Yelp and Manta that you will want to also get added. You also want to ensure your listing is consistent from site to site. If you listings don't match it could hurt your SEO strength. It might also cause google to think you are two different companies.
Once you have your google business profile set up, then you want to clean up your meta descriptions on your images and pages. These descriptions help provide user information to the search engine bots. Every image needs a meta descriptions that will help the search engines.
Next you want to build out your backlinks. Ranking on top of google search has many factors. One of which is how many other sites link to your website. Not only that, but what quality website is being used to link to you. Higher quality pages will help boost your website in the google rankings. Weaker pages linking to you might also hurt your ranking. You can use a another free google webmaster tool called disavow to discredit the weaker links that are hurting your site. The disavow tool can be found here: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/disavow-links-main
The last and probably greatest factor that goes into your google search is something you already have an active hand in doing. Content is king. If you have great content, then you will get a higher google ranking. Google actually factors in what it believes will be beneficial for its users. If you create a page or blog that has amazing content, then it will go a long way to boosting your rankings. Try to create pages that are one stop shops. If you are an expert in a given field, then share your expert advise. If google can't find other content that's better than yours, it will boost your rankings to help its readers have a better experience. It's better to make one super blog that talks about everything related to your field of service than multiple little blogs.
The last thing I wanted to call out is time. None of these improvements will increase your rankings overnight. However, after 30 days or more, then you will start seeing your rank increase. It takes time for you to see the benefits of your hard work in this area.
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