Fact, in 2017, Google has captured 77% of the search engine market. This means that if you can rank high in a Google search result, you will be seen by many people – millions of people! This could translate into profits and exposure that your company has never seen! This exposure comes through organic search which is achieved through implementing proper Search Engine Optimization (SEO) practices on your website. So, what is SEO?
I’m going to use the analogy of a parking lot to describe what SEO is.
Not having SEO on your website is like trying to find your grey car in a massive parking lot full of grey cars. It’ll be impossible to find it, because in a sea of commonality everything looks the same, right? Right now, there are 1.2 billion websites in the world. These are websites that you can only get to if you are connected to the internet. So, if you want your website to be found or known to the public it would have to be recognized by the biggest search engine in the world – Google.
There are many important things that Phoenix Agency, an SEO company in Vaughan does to every website so that it is SEO friendly. These things must all work towards describing your website’s content – truthfully. What this means is, if your website is about cars, then the pictures should be of cars, the written content should be about cars, and the title of the website should be associated to cars etc. An unoptimized website will not be ranked high by Google and if there are exploits that abuse SEO rules, Google will penalize the website. There are a few things to consider when optimizing a website:
- Title tags – this is the title of your webpage. If your title is present, then people will have a good idea of what your website is all about. Google likes this because they’re all about keeping the billions of web pages out there filed and indexed so people will find them easily.
- Alt Tags – alt tags are names for pictures on your website. Google likes pictures, especially pictures that are properly named. So, if you have an image of a dog, make sure it’s called ‘image of a dog’ and not ‘Star Wars – Revenge of the Sith’. Jedi Masters have nothing to do with an image of a dog. Google won’t like this and will penalize your website for lying to them.
- Using SEO friendly URLs – if your contact page has ‘contact page’ in the URL, then Google will reward you by not penalizing your website. Remember, Google likes when pages are properly labeled because this makes things easy to file.
- Using outbound links – Google is into community. Having links on your site that connect to other websites is a good thing. This shows Google that you’re connecting to other websites with useful information
Each of these things make your website more recognizable to Google. This makes it easier for Google to index and file your website so that when people look for your site they can easily find it.
So, let’s go back to the parking lot analogy. Without any kind of SEO on your website, your grey car will look just like every other grey car in a parking lot full of grey cars. But once you start to implement SEO practices on your website, your site starts to stand out, and the more SEO practices that you implement the more recognizable it becomes. Eventually it will be clearly visible. There are many factors like content, inbound links, social media that all contribute to Google being able to index your site. And without a proper SEO strategy your website and business will never be found. An optimized site will make your website more visible to the people that matter the most – your current and future clients.
