Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
If you want a website for a business, it needs to help generate revenue to justify the investment, or you end up wasting your money. When the World Wide Web first began, the primary way to drive traffic to your website was through what is called Search Engine Optimization (SEO). While Search Engine Marketing has become a bigger factor in recent years, SEO is still important. What exactly is SEO?
The Internet search engines (Google, Yahoo, Overture, MSN, Altavista, Lycos, etc) are what a potential customer uses to find a product or service like the one you sell. They are sort of like using the phone company's yellow pages, only they are way more powerful. Unless your business is already a nationally known company (like Ben and Jerry's or Baskin Robbins), the potential customer will not search on your company name. What they will do is search by product or service categories. For example, if you want to find an ice cream store near Huntington, WV, a web user might type "ice cream, west virginia" in a search engine, and see what shows up. However, due to the nature of the internet, you might get 10,000 or even 10 million results under those search terms. On average, most web users do NOT get past the first few pages of search results. So, unless your web site shows up in the first few pages of a search on key words related to your business, very few people will find your website, no matter how cool it looks. The way to get your website in the first few pages is through SEO. There are two primary categories of SEO:
- Natural, or organic, optimization, which involves how the web site is constructed
- Links from other websites to your website
Both of the categories are necessary if you want to drive customers to your website. And you want to know a secret? Most web design companies don't understand them. NeoNexus routinely reviews websites that have absolutely no optimization incorporated into their design. This is one of the reasons customers come to NeoNexus.
Google is the major player in the search engine world. Over 50% of all searches are done on Google. That means that all other search engines COMBINED don't get used as much as Google. How did they achieve this position? Simply stated, it was key word relevancy. Google's goal is to get a web searcher the exact information they need when they do a search. Google actively monitors the web for designers that use tricks to try to get to the top of the search engines, and adjusts their search robots to compensate. And of course, they guard their search engine logic as close as the recipe for making Coca-Cola. What this means to you is that the methods of implementing SEO are constantly evolving, and web design companies who don't stay extremely current on SEO techniques are wasting your time. In fact, in some cases, what worked before will actually hurt you now.
There are over 100,000 websites PER DAY being added to the internet. Do you want to just throw your website out there and hope someone finds it, or do you want to take steps that are guaranteed to drive customers to your website? Let NeoNexus be your choice for website search engine optimization. Call us TODAY for a free website analysis.
One word of warning...submitting your domain name monthly to hundreds or thousands of search engines is a popular selling point of many so called SEO experts. One vendor attempted to sell NeoNexus a marketing package where they would submit our domain to over 400,000 search engines a month. Sounds great doesn't it? The major flaw in the theory is that Google and Yahoo together have approximately 80% of the search engine traffic. Microsoft's MSN and AOL have another 15%, so guess how much value the other 399,996 search engines have? Almost nothing. Not to mention that Google states on their website that submission of domains is no longer required...Google scans them automatically, and submission does nothing to bump you up in their list. So don't go running off spending monthly fees on getting your domain submitted...there are far better ways to improve your ranking. Let us show you how.
