SEO or Search Engine Optimization is a technique used to help your potential customers find your products and/or services in the search engines. This is accomplished by applying specific techniques to the code, the content and working on off-site factors. The goal is to drive highly targeted traffic to your website that is more likely to convert into sales due to the fact they are actively searching for your specific products or services. In short, it is putting your website in front of customers in Google or Bing’s organic (natural) search listings so you are easily found.

We’ll go over the basic aspects of SEO from a high-level, generalized viewpoint here.

Keyword Phrase Research

A keyword phrase is what the user types in as a query at the search engine. You must always start with determining what keyword phrases will drive the most targeted traffic to your site. This is not guesswork. This is actual research using a variety of online tools that can help determine which phrases people are actively searching for relative to your products or services.

On-site SEO

On-site SEO is manually editing the content and code of your site by making changes to each page to reflect the targeted keyword phrase.  Since each page of your site will have a unique keyword phrase associated with it, each page must be edited for that page’s phrase or topic.  This would include editing your written copy, title tags, meta description, H tags, alt tags, internal linking, and much more.

Off-site SEO

Off-site SEO is just what it sound like.  It’s SEO-related work that is performed offsite that influences on-site SEO.  It is just as important as on-site SEO, if not more so.  Some aspects of off-site SEO include:

• Setting up accounts in Google and Bing search consoles, submitting XML sitemaps, setting up Google Analytics
• Setting up a Google My Business profile – Standardize citations
• Help generate customer reviews
• Link building – Establishing inbound links from relevant sites that point back to your site that build domain authority.  Think of an inbound link as a vote for your site.
• Social media –  Creation, linkage, content, connections, and participation

Why You Should Start on SEO Now

SEO is an essential part of any online marketing campaign.  Great organic or natural listing in the search engines is considered to be the holy grail for marketers and business owners.  However, it is a slow roll to the top of the search engine results page in crowded markets.  There are no shortcuts or speeding through to the first page and this is by design.  Over the years, Google has constantly modified its algorithm to make sure its listings are clean of spam and non-relevant results.  This is actually a good thing for all of us.  In a highly competitive market, it can take years of SEO work to achieve excellent results.

There are some exceptions to this rule such as small-town local business,  targeted local searches, and unique products and services but this still depends on how much competition is out there and already embedded with an optimized site.

Conclusion

SEO, while not rocket science, is a highly detailed discipline with many nuances that must not be ignored.  It is a vital part of every internet marketing campaign for all businesses.  We recommend a SEO professional to get you on the right track from the beginning.  A botched SEO effort is not easy to recover from and will surely cost you time and money.

Again, this information is presented from a very high level.  There is much more that goes into an internet marketing campaign than what is described above.   We will be happy to discuss our Houston SEO plans in more detail with you. We are ready to help you grow your business.  Contact us for a free site review and proposal.