Why You Should Care About SEO

Large artistic print of the letters SEO

The modern world is one of abundant information. So much so that without guiding tools like SEO, it would take forever to find specific content on the internet. Of course, this doesn’t hold true for those situations where someone already has the URL of their destination. Instead, this is a fact of life for anytime someone uses an internet search engine to find particular kinds of content.

The majority of internet traffic is search-driven instead of direct. This means there’s more potential to get people on your website by optimizing your site’s visibility than by handing out your URL. You should do both, but if you have to focus only on one, my recommendation would be to choose SEO.

When you optimize your site for search engines, you increase the number of people that will see it when searching for the kind of content that your website contains. This means that if your selling, let’s say, coffee mugs, your website, when properly optimized, will pop up in response to any searches that might be related to coffee mugs and will rank even higher for searches that include things like “buy coffee mug.”

SEO in 2019 is all about content. Long past are the days of choosing a few keywords and stuffing your site full of them. The algorithms have gotten smarter since then, and now the way to get ahead in search engine rankings is to create robust, relevant content. This doesn’t mean you can throw those keywords out the window, though. They’re still an essential part of your website visibility strategy.

Instead of ditching all those carefully chosen keywords and phrases, you want to generate engaging content written around them. So, to continue our earlier example of coffee mugs, you would want to write about coffee mugs with the intent of it being read by human eyes and not just algorithms. This could mean talking about the history of mugs, or writing reviews for coffee mugs, or even creating content around pairing different mugs with different holidays, seasons, or activities.

That’s all well and good, and now you have a site that will show up for anyone looking to study coffee mugs. What you want, though, is to rank particularly high for people who are interested in buying coffee mugs, not just learning about them. Don’t worry; this part is easy to weave in once you have the main content. What you’ll do is add 3-4 (per 500 words) instances where you talk about buying coffee mugs. Best practice is to have this in mind when writing the main body of text and to incorporate your chosen keywords and phrases into the structure and style of that text, but for explanatory purposes, I’ve presented them as separate steps.

Let’s say you chose coffee mug history for the body of your content. Work into the end of a paragraph something along the lines of, “If you like these historic mugs, consider buying our Xyz coffee mug and have a sip of the past.” Now, if you’re going to use that line, then you want to make sure that this Xyz mug in question has some reason to be spoken of in such a way. It doesn’t matter whether it’s built in an old style that was just being read about, or if it has imagery on it that somehow references the era discussed in your text; all that matters is that it does the job and doesn’t make the readers (potential customers) feel deceived.

Two paragraphs up, I mentioned adding your keywords and phrases only 3-4 times per 500 words. This is a loose parameter to simplify the process. Experts in the SEO field vary in their opinion of what keyword density should be, but on average, they report that between 1 and 3 percent is optimal. Less than that, and it won’t significantly help your visibility. More than that you risk being flagged for search spam or keyword stuffing. When you go over these recommendations, the inclusion of these keywords or phrases can actually hurt your ranking.

Now that you’ve read an overview of how it works, you can see why you should care about SEO. Without proper search engine optimization, your website will be lost in the masses, forever buried from all but the most tenacious of internet sleuths. With search engine optimization, however, your site can rise to the top where all your potential customers are browsing.

If you’re interested in procuring professional SEO services, fill out my inquiry form, and I will get back to you asap to discuss further details.