Why Search Matters – SEO
How does your audience find you?
When a user pulls up a browser, they will start with a search more than 50% of the time. This means that the abilities of people to find your product resides in the grasp of search companies such as Google, Yahoo, Bing and other major engines.
Search engines are the gatekeepers of the web, controlling traffic and in turn influencing your website’s ability to perform. The most valuable commodity on the web is traffic. If your website gets traffic, chances are that a good portion of it comes from a search engine’s natural results.
Does your website help, or hurt your ability to get traffic from the web?
So how does your website help or harm your ability to get traffic? Imagine that there is a large river of traffic available for your particular subject. There are many streams (sources) that contribute to the river, and there is one particular source that will always keep flowing as long as you protect the source of that stream. Other streams (advertising) may come and go, but the natural spring source will always contribute the most.
Case Study On Search Value – Learn more about a successful SEO campaign
This natural stream is your website and all of the content that resides in it; including the code, the words, the pictures, the videos, etc. The code on your website can cause a dam or a hemorrhage from the main stream that diverts water and hinders the river reaching its full potential. Based on our experience with hundreds of sites – your website is most likely not correctly constructed and maintained, and therefore not reaching its full potential. How is this possible? One simple answer… your webmaster may not have the knowledge. Or the webmaster may have a niche oriented service where competing products are both under their control.
Search engine rules
In our experience… and the experience of those who understand the critical nature of search, there are a few seemingly simple things that your site must have and do to play by the search engines rules. To get traffic you must abide by the guidelines set out by the major search engines. If you don’t follow these principals you risk cutting off the lifeblood of your website and the main source of your stream for traffic, and in turn your ability to turn that traffic into hard earned cash.
As a disclaimer… You should know that getting and keeping a page ranked in the search engines in an inexact science. There are too many factors at play to understand, measure and guarantee page performance. The search engines don’t allow you or us to understand fully, and thus SEO’s can’t game the system.
There are several other factors (200) that affect ranking: domain age, content relevance, changes to the algorithm (Google made 420 changes in one year – that is more than 1 per day!), time relevance, competitive landscape, subject area… and the list goes on…
Did you know that search engines are just 1/3rd of a successful online marketing campaign? Learn more about our web design methodology here.
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