Why SEO is the Foundation of Your Online Strategy

Your company’s online strategy is dependent, actually dependent on your choice of words. Keywords actually. Without them your online presence might as well be online absence. Not going online nowadays might as well be committing slow suicide in a business sense. People use search engines, primarily Google, to find just about everything. And search engines are dependent on keywords. The proper use of keyboards is dependent on the process called Search Engine Optimization. Search Engine Optimization, otherwise known as SEO, is the foundation of your online strategy.

The proper use of SEO will be the means in which customers can easily find you online in the most cost-effective way possible. Otherwise you will have to resort to ads. Lots and lots of ads. But if SEO is the foundation of your online strategy, customers will be able to find your articles, your website, and therefore your business online depending on the keywords they use.

So how does SEO work?

SEO is the process of increasing the quality and quantity of website traffic through search engines. Often users know what they want, but they don’t know where to go to. It’s much like going through the index of a phonebook where customers are looking for say – plumbing. The phonebook will arrange all the service providers within the area, the city or the state, often in alphabetical order, or depending on how much the business paid the phone company. However, this is not how the web works. It’s not a place where thousands upon thousands of similar businesses can be named A1 or 1A Plumbing to come out on top.

There are several factors on how search engines determine what comes out on top of search results. Those factors, including keyword placement, are what businesses should exploit. Determining how search engines prioritize websites in search results is why SEO is the foundation of any business online strategy.

Guidelines

Google provides guidelines on how websites can be found in their search engines. Proper keyword placement, not just within the content, but in the various elements of the website itself. Placement that is on every page, in the website headers, and the footers. There are also rules about not overdoing or flooding your website with keywords. In the 90s and the early 2000s, pages contained nothing but keywords and gibberish. Google’s algorithms, for example, can determine if the content actually makes sense and not simply plastered with keywords.

If SEO is the foundation of your online strategy, it should make sense to build a SEO-compatible website from the ground up. Invest in an expert, if you’re just starting your business. You should hire competent SEO writers as well for the content. But if you’re late to the game, you may need to hire a SEO expert to re-do or overhaul your website to stick to Google and other search engine rules. One thing to note is that those rules change periodically. Which means SEO is not a one-time thing. SEO is the foundation, so it needs to remain as part of your business machinery if you want to stay on top of search results.