What is SEO and How Do You Get It?
In case you don’t already know, SEO is the practice of optimizing a website by improving its internal and external aspects to increase search engine traffic. Today’s biggest commercial search engines include Google, Yahoo!, AOL (mostly Google-related) and Ask.com. Together, they account for over 90% of all web traffic. And of course, now there's bing.com, which is being marketed as a "decision engine."
SEO is based on “search queries,” those words and short phrases (together known as keywords) that computer users/web surfers type into search boxes while online. Finding and using the keywords best suited to your particular website/product/service has extraordinary value.
How does SEO work?
While the right keywords can make your content more accessible and draw thousands of visitors to your site, the wrong keywords can bury your site so deep in the search results that you will become virtually invisible (most people don’t search beyond the first page or two, anyway). Practitioners who understand and use SEO have a decided advantage in terms of reaching out to their online audience and attracting new patients or referrers to their websites.
Search engines use automated programs called "spiders" or “bots” to “crawl” around the Web. They use the Web’s hyperlink structure to search all the available web pages, now estimated at over 20 billion total (though only about half of those have actually been crawled). Once a page has been crawled, its contents can be "indexed" into a giant database. This index is tightly managed so that searches can be completed in fractions of a second.
Include SEO when writing web content.
In order for SEO to be most effective, it must be included in your site content. Whoever writes content for your website should be knowledgeable and experienced with SEO-style writing. At least, your home page should describe your services fully using as many keywords as possible. A skilled SEO writer can blend keywords smoothly into your text without being obvious.
Commercial search engines rely on the science of information retrieval, or IR. This is based on two critical factors: relevance and popularity. In pure search terms, the relevance of any document increases if the keywords or phrases queried occur multiple times in the text, title, page headlines or subheads. Popularity is the relative importance (based on the number of citations in other documents) of a given document that matches the user's keyword query. The popularity of a given document increases as other documents (i.e. weblogs or blogs) reference it.
If your website is consistently buried in the search results, now is the time to take a closer look at SEO and what it can do for you. To learn more about SEO, call Practice Builders at 800.679.1262 today.
SEO is based on “search queries,” those words and short phrases (together known as keywords) that computer users/web surfers type into search boxes while online. Finding and using the keywords best suited to your particular website/product/service has extraordinary value.
How does SEO work?
While the right keywords can make your content more accessible and draw thousands of visitors to your site, the wrong keywords can bury your site so deep in the search results that you will become virtually invisible (most people don’t search beyond the first page or two, anyway). Practitioners who understand and use SEO have a decided advantage in terms of reaching out to their online audience and attracting new patients or referrers to their websites.
Search engines use automated programs called "spiders" or “bots” to “crawl” around the Web. They use the Web’s hyperlink structure to search all the available web pages, now estimated at over 20 billion total (though only about half of those have actually been crawled). Once a page has been crawled, its contents can be "indexed" into a giant database. This index is tightly managed so that searches can be completed in fractions of a second.
Include SEO when writing web content.
In order for SEO to be most effective, it must be included in your site content. Whoever writes content for your website should be knowledgeable and experienced with SEO-style writing. At least, your home page should describe your services fully using as many keywords as possible. A skilled SEO writer can blend keywords smoothly into your text without being obvious.
Commercial search engines rely on the science of information retrieval, or IR. This is based on two critical factors: relevance and popularity. In pure search terms, the relevance of any document increases if the keywords or phrases queried occur multiple times in the text, title, page headlines or subheads. Popularity is the relative importance (based on the number of citations in other documents) of a given document that matches the user's keyword query. The popularity of a given document increases as other documents (i.e. weblogs or blogs) reference it.
If your website is consistently buried in the search results, now is the time to take a closer look at SEO and what it can do for you. To learn more about SEO, call Practice Builders at 800.679.1262 today.