SEO doesn’t have to be Scary

SEO boils down to who is making money and how. I am going to stick to using Google as an example because they run the table for search engines. Google provides a service, people enter what they want and Google provides “what it thinks” are the top results. This is how google makes money, when a user enters something into a Google search the user knows and trusts that they will be given the most relevant results. Companies utilizing Google make money because they get the most targeted customers out of any marketing medium!

In online search there are two kinds of results “organic” and “paid”. Organic results are the regular “top ten” results you get and are hyper targeted to what the user just searched. In contrast, paid results are the advertisements that companies pay to place next to the organic results in search queries that relate to their product or service. They both have a positive impact on the marketing of a companies website, and both should be utilized.

The elephant in the room was mentioned in the opening paragraph: Google provides “what it thinks” are the top results. What Google thinks is a lot less cryptic than you are led to believe. Google algorithms decide what are the top results and these algorithms are designed to mirror what a person is actually looking for when they perform a search.

Therefore, the best ways to rank well in search engines include:

1. Be easily understood by the search engines
2. Do not try to fool the search engines
3. Provide honest content about what your business or service provides

Easily Understood by the Search Engines

Being easily understood by the search engines is the core of SEO. Yes, now I can define SEO, it is Search Engine Optimization. You need to have the code of your website clearly structured so that the search engine crawler (thing that reads your website) can easily understand what your website is about. I have come across many situations where companies are successfully handling #2 and #3 above but it doesn’t matter because you are not being understood by the search engines.

The biggest mistake I see companies make is trying to learn the nuts and bolts of SEO. There is no need! Especially when the definition of clean and understandable code is always changing and growing into the future. A company that makes hiking boots knows hiking boots, so stick to hiking boots! This is easy if you are focusing on #3 above, just write about hiking boots on your website or blog. The key is to have an online environment that can adapt to change. At markITbyte we love platforms like WordPress because they are designed to segregate the three main aspects of a website: structure, style, and content. Any one of the three can be updated or changed without affecting the other two. This is huge because in the next 6 months when Google alters their search algorithms to provide better results, WordPress will push out a structure change that will not affect your website’s style or content. You probably will not even know (or care) about this update, but you and your business will be silently growing into the future leveraging the correct technology!