Does SEO work? Yes, and it’s one of the most reliable ways to get more traffic to your web site, be it institutional, e-commerce, or blog. How does SEO work? Simple! When browsing for information, you turn on your computer, go onto a Search Engine like Google or Yahoo/Bing, and then type in what you are looking for. Those Search Engines have gathered information and list websites in order to meet the searcher’s needs. The sites are listed by rank, with the sites they consider the best sites on the top of the first pages you view. Those search engines must be able to find your site. They have to decide what the website is about then have to give your site value compared to the data they have gathered about other sites. They view ones web site by a number of variables, namely the keywords as well as by the other sites that consider your site to be valuable by linking back to (back linking) to it.
How Does SEO Work? And Here are Some Tips
- Content – Content is King, pure and simple. The more content there is on a website, the more “authoritative” it becomes. Targeted content is important, and having an article contain a significant amount of the targeted keyword term(s) will significantly help you reach your target audience for select terms.
- SEO keywords – Find what keywords people are using. Take those keywords and use them effectively in the title and meta keywords/description tags, h1/h2 tags, body content, urls, alt text for images, and links wherever possible. Pound away at it wisely, remembering that the content has to be legible and not “spammy.”
- Creating back-links – Get links back to the pages you want to draw readers to. This can be done with article marketing, forums, guest posts, social media, comments on other blogs, press releases and social bookmarking….just to name a few ways.
- Having a site map – Get your site map on your sites. On Word Press use the Google XML Sitemaps Plug-in; Other sites use XML-SiteMaps.com
- Submitting to Webmaster tools – Join Google Webmaster Central. Set up your free account and use those tools to help you rank higher in the search engines.
Why Does SEO Work?
Why does SEO work? Here’s some info from Eric Enge’s blog, Stone Temple:
- Companies that put effort into SEO saw an increase in traffic as compared to companies that put in very little effort.
- SEO can increase site stickiness.
- Gain high value for your brand.
- The whole article is worth taking a look at.
- It is free targeted traffic – Learn simple SEO techniques for free traffic to you sites, articles and videos. This is targeted traffic. Traffic that is looking for the information you have.
- It is simple – Now others might argue with this statement because the search engines are always changing…but the basic foundation of SEO seems to stay the same. Learn SEO basics.
- Easy to put into action – Once you know how to find and use key words it is easy to get those keywords into all of your marketing efforts.
Bottom line, SEO does work, but SEO also does require work, too.
