Are you considering SEO but feeling a little queasy?

As a professional SEO company with multiple SEO professionals staffed, we help companies make their sites better adhere to Google’s algorithms and best practices so their sites get found when users search for a keyword that matches the content on their site.

Think of these algorithms as the rules for a game, except those rules change almost every day and no one ever tells you exactly what they are.

This lack of transparency and constant state of flux means most companies need someone like me to help them understand the rules they need to follow so they can do well in Google’s organic search – the area below the ads in the center of a search engine results page (SERP).

The better a site adheres to those rules, the more visibility they are given, and that means the traffic they get. And the more traffic they get, the more money they should be able to make.

In the end, SEO professionals literally stand between people getting hired or fired. If a site does well, more people get hired. If the site doesn’t, people go home.

SEO is vital to the success of an online business today.

 

SEO is the Driver of your Sites Placement

SEO is not an afterthought or something you just tack on at the end. It is the driver of all placements in Google’s organic search.

Nothing gets a visible position in Google without successfully meeting (in some capacity) the factors necessary to rank.

So in ignoring SEO as part of the research, the most you can have is a correlation, not causation.

 

Ranking Factors & Your Website

There are more than 200 main ranking factors in Google organic search.

Think of these as rules, that Google uses to match your query to a piece of site content in its repository.

These “factors” are the parts of the algorithm a site has to “hit” for Google to rank it well. If you do not hit these factors at the right thresholds, you will not rank as well as someone else.

 

How Can I Get Ranked?

If a site wants to get to the regular (universal) search results, they have to successfully meet the ranking factor criteria Google looks for in a quality site.

Google wants a quality site. By making sure your site meets those criteria, you communicate to Google that your site is possibly one they want to show first for a query or least on the first page – because we all know no one goes to Page 2.

The better the site meets those factors, the better it ranks in the SERP, which requires you meet their ranking factors and best practices better than the other sites competing for that placement.

Some of the ranking factors are:

• How many links come to your site and from what sources? Are they “quality” links?
• How fast do your pages download?
• How fresh is your content? (Query Deserves Freshness – this does not apply to all sites.)
• Is your site ad-heavy?
• Is your content well written and topically organized?
• Is your content optimized for your search queries?
• How well do your pages link internally?
• For news sites, is your news section clearly marked in the site architecture?

 

Making a decision to begin optimization on your website is, quite frankly, a no-brainer. Whether your finding quality links, curating valuable content, or developing expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness on your page, make a point to read up on all the latest rules of the game, as well as the changes in the rules.