SEO – What’s the Big Deal?
Everyone who runs a website knows that traffic is the key to success. In order to make the most out of your website, you need visitors. As many as possible! But for your website to generate traffic, you need it to be liked by the major search engines. A lot! And this is where search engine optimisation, commonly known simply as SEO steps in.
Before we get to SEO, let’s see how an average user behaves on the web. Just like you and me, most people use the search engines to look for things they are interested in and open websites that are displayed on the search engine results page or SERP. Usually, they open only the very first few websites on the first SERP. Only a few move to the bottom of the SERP and even fewer look what is on the second page. Obviously, your website will not come far if it is not ranked as high as possible by the major search engines no matter how great it looks and no matter how great content it has. And in order to make the search engines like your website and rank it high, you need to optimise it.
Unfortunately, SEO is a very complicated thing. No one really knows how the website ranking system actually works and there is no single SEO strategy which would guarantee success. In addition, the algorithms that are used by the search engines for website ranking are continuously being upgraded. As a result, the same SEO strategies that worked yesterday may no longer work tomorrow.
It is highly important to be aware that you cannot fool the search engines. You might but not for long. And when the spiders discover that you employ unethical techniques which are against the search engine “rules”, you can be sure that you will get punished for it. Your website will be “degraded” or possibly even banned. So do not try to outsmart the search engines and stick to the rules of ethical SEO.
SEO is without a doubt the key to success because the more web users you reach the greater the chance that you will sell your products/service or earn a decent amount of money through pay-per-click adds. However, SEO alone will not impress the visitors of your website and keep them coming back. Remember that the web user is king and be sure to keep that in mind when using SEO strategies if you want to succeed in the long term. Another way to improve your website ranking and attract more visitors to your website is to leave over the whole SEO thing to the professionals.