Do you even know what SEO is?

If you ask a person, “What is SEO?”, 99/100 people under the age of 50 will say, “Yeah, that’s search engine optimization.” If you ask those same 100 people if they know what search engine optimization entails, 99/100 will say, “Ummm, that’s that thing where… isn’t it when… it makes your website better…right?”

Most people have heard the words SEO and search engine optimization before, but few people actually know what the process entails, let alone how they can benefit from it.

5 Thing You Don’t Know About Optimization:

1. It can be the single largest reason why traffic is, or is not driven to your website
2. When used in a poor or irresponsible manner, it can seriously damage your company and its reputation
3. Reaping the tangible benefits of optimizing your website for search engines will normally take several months to over a year, causing many people to stop their efforts too short
4. If you are not actively pursuing SEO efforts, it’s likely that whatever investment you make into building a website will mostly go to waste
5. Building a website and not investing in search engine optimization is the equivalent of throwing a party and not sending out any invitations!

But what is SEO?

Google would tell you that it is – “the process of affecting the visibility of a website or a web page in a search engine’s “natural” or un-paid (“organic”) search results.”

In simpler terms – best use is in creating original content using terms that search engines will find relevant to search key words that are entered. For example, a search keyword term might be, “where to buy an awesome chainsaw”. A bad search result would be a link to the horror film Chainsaw. A good search result would be a link to a hardware store that sells chainsaw equipment.

If the chainsaw equipment company is an avid blogger about tree-cutting, posting in social media groups that have a bunch of lumber-jack members, and sharing that content on linked-in with other hardware store owners, it is likely that they are successfully optimizing the search term ‘chainsaw’.

If you wisely chose to build a website through a professional web development services organization, there is a good chance they also provide SEO services.