Why is SEO Necessary?

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization is today among the fastest growing marketing strategies.  A lot of business owners are trying to their revenues by offering their services and products in the internet. It’s getting very important to market yourselves properly in the internet.

Here’s why SEO can be a critical factor in marketing.

Many business owners believe that merely having an online presence is enough. So they set up a Facebook page, perhaps a twitter account and pay for a site hosting for their own website and call it a day. Unfortunately, that’s not enough to get you in the search pages. For search engines to get you at the top of the rankings, you’ll need to be referred to by other sites, preferably by other ranking sites.

The traditional marketing method, such as using paper media or television can only reach a limited number of people due to various reasons. It may be readership popularity, business markets or simply brand recognition. What’s worse, the more you spend on traditional methods, the higher your costs will be.

SEO, which is also a form of marketing method, if utilized correctly, can give you the benefit of worldwide audience at minimal costs.

To market your business, you can try telemarketing, running ads on TV or on paper. However, with SEO within your arsenal, once you reach the top of the search pile, anyone who is searching for your particular service will have access to your site. Even if they’re using different search engines, it will certainly increase your business a lot more.

If your business considers your website as your engine that drives you to success, in that context, you can consider SEO as the oil that and an SEO Expert as the mechanic. 

What to Look For In a Good SEO Company.

People who are turning into online commerce are steadily increasing. A lot of people are now realizing that having an online store offers an advantage compared to having to rent out office space. Aside from that, a lot of services are now being offered to online clients to maximize their income.

In order to be an effective online merchant, one thing you will need is SEO. However, it'll be pretty hard to start up a web store and start SEO as well, not unless you have enough manpower and resources.

Take note that dominating a very competitive industry is not very easy, especially if you're competing with brands or companies that have existed for more than a decade. That is why you need to avail of SEO services. Instead of training yourself to do SEO or (and most likely starting from scratch), it will be better for you to avail of SEO services. If your business relies heavily on online traffic, you can't afford not to avail of SEO services. SEO companies will certainly help you increase your rankings and increase your revenue.

When hiring an SEO firm, be sure that the following services are being offered.

Keyword Research

This is the basics of SEO. Every activity involved in SEO has everything to do with the keywords you want to rank for. You need to consider the number of searches for your keyword. Trying to rank for a keyword that only gets 5 hits per month isn't exactly what you'd call a lucrative business.

Link Building

Another necessary part of SEO is getting links out in the web. The more links you have, the better your site will rank for certain keywords. Every SEO firm should be able to do as much. However, make sure that they're doing white hat strategy. There are SEO companies that do black hat strategy. Admittedly, it can work for a while. Unfortunately, search engines like Google and Yahoo didn't hire PhD grads just so you can easily cheat them. I'm not saying black hat strategies don't work. In fact they do, but it's something that's short-lived.

Social Media Marketing

Increasing your hits will require you to delve into social media marketing. Almost every user of internet spends at least a few minutes, if not hours, on social media like Facebook, twitter, etc. Tapping into these can certainly expand your potential market.

How to Write an Article for SEO Purposes

If you’re running a business that relies strongly on the internet, you’ll have to do a little bit of SEO. And a component of SEO is doing article writing for SEO purposes. There are slight differences between an ordinary article and an article that was made for SEO. SEO writing is the process of combining good quality content and proper keyword usage. In order to do that, see the steps below.

Always start with keyword research

The logical thing to do if you want to rank for keywords is to do keyword research. There are many tools available in the internet, some of them are free. These tools allow you to determine which keywords you should be using by providing you the number of searches per month, among other details.

Identify topics of relevance

Make sure to choose the topics carefully for your keywords. Lately, search engines are getting in terms of identifying which sites to give in the search results.

Write the article

Write the article like you do when writing ordinary articles. The basics still apply, providing an introductory paragraph, the content and a conclusion. Be sure to write high quality, valuable content, something which people would spend some time to actually read.

Insert your keywords

Here’s the tricky part. When you already wrote the article that’s related to your keyword, it’s most likely that you’ve already used that keyword. Make sure though that you haven’t used the keywords too much because it might trigger some spam filters. Instead of repetitively using the same keywords, it would be good to replace them with what we call ‘cousin keywords’. That way, you get to increase the relevance of your topic without being labeled as spam.

Don’t forget to link back to your site

A good practice when writing the article is to make sure that it links back to your site. If you’re writing for your site content, a common practice would be to link back to your home page or perhaps another page in your site. That way, readers can easily navigate through different contents of your site. However, linking to different sites isn’t necessary for your own content.

On the other hand, if you’re writing for article submission (another common practice for SEO), it’s important that you don’t forget to insert the links to your site. Otherwise, the content you wrote will just be good for reading and gives you no benefit in SEO perspective.

Being Bad Is Not Good For Website SEO

People have been going on and on with efforts to increase their online presence through any means and now that has even included being rude to your customers, all for website SEO.

In case you didn't know, there was an article published in New York Times talking about a business which intentionally created bad customer experiences in order to improve their rankings. As a result, they did boost their ratings in search engines.

According to the merchant, you can generate complaints and negative complaints for your site. The main point of the article is that being bad on the web is good for business. Such an unorthodox approach, but can be considered ingenious to those who want visitors for that purpose only.

However, Google caught up with them and is now extending its efforts to provide search results that exclude those businesses. They developed an algorithmic solution that detects those merchants that provide very bad customer experience. They do not intend to disclose the details of their solution because of people trying to work their way around the Google ranking system.

Aside from changing their search algorithms to address this issue, they also penalized the business for doing such act.

It cannot be avoided that people will always try and find loopholes in the ranking algorithms. However, just to be clear, Google is making it clear that being bad to customers is bad for business in Google.

Remember that Website SEO's main purpose is to increase your online presence in order to get potential customers to come to your site. Building a good lasting relationship with them is your responsibility as a merchant as well.

If you spent all your efforts making bad publicity in order to increase your rankings, it may end up backfiring.

Make Your Visitors Stay With This Tips

Everyone that lands on your website is a potential customer. Instead of having them jump to the next site of interest, there are ways of making sure that they stick around and browse through your other pages.

Below are some of the ways that you can have these visitors stay a little longer and hopefully be frequent visitors or even followers.

Make every page a landing page. Google indexes every page you have and when they end up in the search engines, depending on your SEO efforts, they can land on different pages and not just your home page. Remember that every page in your site should be treated as a landing page. Develop your pages to look as if it were the first page that visitors will see.

Publish more true content. A lot of people use link bait to get people to their site. It's a strategy of getting people there in the first place. However, if your site doesn't really have the information the customer wants, they'll just be upset and leave your site immediately. So be sure to link bait carefully. It may damage your reputation.

If you say it, do it. We often promise readers something if they click on our links. If you promise them a free report, or a solution, or an informational article, don't make them buy them at the end of all your marketing pages. You need to give some to get some. If you promise you can teach them how to play chess by reading your post, then teach them how to play chess, or at least give them some pointers to do better at chess. This is short of saying that you shouldn't lie in you post titles. Readers will never trust you again if you're using a lot of misleading headlines.

Avoid teasing, or at least minimize it. You can be tempted to do some introductory paragraph do brace the reader for something that you're actually presenting. You may ask them questions to lead them on, making them think that you understand them. Don't prolong this too much. Sometimes readers want to get straight to the point. It's better to get down to business and stop flirting.

It's great that you get to have readers in your site. But remember that it's just as important, or even more important, to get them to stay and return for more.