If you’re running a business, you may have heard about the importance of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to drawing customers in to your business. But chances are you don’t know exactly why SEO is so important. After all, it’s a complicated and highly nuanced topic with lots of ins and outs. What you know is that it has something to do with Google Search and how potential customers find you on the Internet. But you have no idea how to leverage this tool to its fullest advantage.
We’re going to explain here just what SEO is, why it’s important, and how Dragonspire Media can help you optimize your SEO score so you can take full advantage of web searches to make your business stand out from everyone else on the Web.
What Exactly Is SEO?
The definition of Search Engine Optimization is pretty straightforward. Search engines, like Google Search and Bing, look at and analyze every website and, based on a variety of factors, assign a score to each site. The higher your SEO score, the further up in search results your business will appear and the more likely potential customers are to find you. In an ideal world, you want a score that’s high enough to place you on the first page of search results, but the statistics have shown that very few searchers move beyond the first page of results to find what they’re looking for. Optimally, you want your business to appear in at least the top five results, but the closer to the first result you can get, the better your chances are of drawing visitors to your website. There are numerous tweaks that you can make to your website to increase your SEO score, and it can be a tedious process, especially if you’re not familiar with the process. That’s where we can help.
Do You Have a Website?
The first step in the process of building a quality SEO score, of course, if having a website. Many businesses rely solely on Facebook to attract customers. And while there’s no doubt that Facebook is a powerful platform with high visibility, Facebook does nothing to help you with SEO. They’re all about making money off you, your business, and your customers, so they’re going to focus on their own SEO score and on trying to sell you advertising space. So while there’s no doubt that there’s value in having a Facebook page for your business, that’s only going to take you so far and doesn’t take full advantage of the tools at your disposal.
In order to truly leverage SEO to its fullest potential for your business, you need a true website for your business. This is where we can implement all the tools necessary to maximize your SEO score and make sure your business appears above your competitors in search engine results. Dragonspire Media specializes in building SEO-driven websites. We would be more than happy to provide you a quote on a new website or a redesigned website with SEO specifically in mind.
Secure Socket Layer Certificates
There are a number of factors to consider in optimizing your SEO score, but one of the most recent and important changes in the landscape is Secure Socket Layer (SSL) certificates. SSL is a layer of protection that is required if your business handles transactions online, say, through an online storefront, electronic billing, or any other transaction where credit card and personal information are being transmitted from the customer to your business. SSL takes that information and encrypts it so that even if it gets intercepted by a hacker, the information remains private and your customers are protected from identity theft.
But Google introduced a new wrinkle in the SEO landscape recently where, effectively, they require all websites now to have SSL certificates installed, whether or not you process financial transactions through your website. They look for this additional layer of security and if they don’t find it on your site, they assign a heavy penalty to your SEO score, potentially knocking your site down one or more pages in search engine results. So it’s now become essential that your website has an SSL certificate, regardless of the kind of business you conduct online.
Installing an SSL certificate on your site can be a tedious and complicated process, depending on your webhost. But this just one of many services that we provide our customers, taking all the worry and work out of it for you. Every site we design, develop, or redesign comes with an SSL certificate, ensuring that you’re covered, encrypted, safe, and most importantly, more visible to the customers looking to do business with you.
Content is Key
One of the most basic things that search engines look for when assessing your SEO score is your website’s content. The last thing you want is to build a robust, beautiful website for your business — and then just let it sit there and stagnate. In order to develop a solid SEO score, and keep it, is to be continually generating fresh content. This can come in the form of a blog or journal, new pages, updated copy on existing pages, and so on. Search engines like Google and Bing index websites frequently, and if your content never changes, your SEO score will start to go down, meaning your website will drop in search results. Remember the goal is, at minimum, to get and keep your website on the first page of search results. So writing fresh content regularly is a key piece to ensuring your SEO score remains high. Many businesses don’t leverage this easy tool effectively, and so their sites tend to languish in search results.
And fresh content doesn’t have to be fancy. It can be as easy as a short blog post of just one or two paragraphs that talks about something your business does, a product it offers, or even helpful tips that your customers may find helpful. Oftentimes, though, what happens is that business owners would prefer to focus on their businesses and not their websites, and so never update content on their sites. Again, this is where Dragonspire Media can help. Content development is another of the services we offer, and we offer a monthly content maintenance package that ensures your site always has fresh, insightful copy tailored for your visitors.
Keywords and Metadata
One of the lesser known pieces of the SEO puzzle is the presence (or absence) of keywords and metadata on your website. This is data that invisible to your visitors because it lives in the header of your website, before any of your site’s content ever appears on the screen. But this data is critical to search engines in order for them to properly index and categorize your website. Search engines look for this data to begin the process of scoring your site.
Ideally you want to provide a brief description of your website that describes the products and services your business offers. This will be the description that visitors will see in search engine results beneath your business name. This description needs to be descriptive but concise (ideally less than 156 characters).
Keywords are also important to improving your SEO score. These are both short and long terms that describe and define your business, products, and services. Short keywords will help search engines properly categorize your business website. Long keywords help search engines hone in on more specific results based on the products your visitors are looking for. You want a healthy mix of both short and long keywords to optimize your SEO score, and this is something that we can help you develop and put in place properly.
Various and Sundry
There are at least a dozen other tweaks that can be made to your website to further optimize your SEO score. Some examples include:
- Unique page titles of 70 characters or fewer
- Alt tags on all images that appear on your site
- Mobile-friendly version of your site (included in any site we develop)
- Proper indexing by the major search engines
- An accurate and updated site index
- Proper 301 redirects for old URLs (where applicable)
And this is just a partial list of items to be aware of when optimizing your SEO.
We Can Help
If all this seems overwhelming to you, it isn’t a surprise. There are a lot of factors to consider in optimizing your website’s SEO to attain the best score possible. This is an area in which we specialize. We’ll help you build the best SEO score possible so that your business appears highly ranked in search results. And then we’ll help you tie your website to your social media presence to fully leverage all the tools at your disposal to bring customers to you.
Contact us for a quote. We would love to do business with you.