If you have a website, you need search engine optimization (SEO). But what does that mean?
It sounds so complicated and technical. If you’re like me, you get a solicitation every other day from firms that want to sign you up for their “secret formula” that only they have developed to put your company at the top of Google search engine rankings. Guaranteed.
Gee, Google guards its methodology for ranking sites pretty tightly, so that’s quite a tall order. Even if they get your site to top ranking, how long will it be for?
You will definitely have to sign up for ongoing SEO to get any value out of it, and, most likely, it will be very expensive. Unless you are a huge corporation, you probably don’t need that level of expertise.
Some SEO is very technical and does take considerable wizardry. But that part of the field is only 10%, so the expense only makes sense for the biggest corporations where a small increase will yield a large return on investment.
The rest of us will do just fine with an online copywriter who knows how to research keywords, write meta tags (hidden text tags that only search engines read to rank pages), and write excellent content incorporating those keywords.
Combine that with a little work to create some inbound links to your site, which is not too hard, and you’ve done it. That’s 90% of SEO.
TIP OF THE WEEK: When your firm ranks highly in natural search results, you immediately have more credibility. Click here to read about how to write your own meta tags.
(© 2011 Katherine Andes)
