What is SEO, Anyway? | Experts opine on how to stay at the top of search results
Almost every business has a website nowadays. But simply having a site is not enough to attract new customers if they can’t find it easily, area experts say.
Enter search engine optimization, or SEO — the techniques used to improve the rankings and visibility of a website on Internet search engines like Google.
And for companies today, SEO is more important than ever, said Andrea Harris, owner of Stow-based Minerva Solutions.
“Just having a website isn’t good enough,” Harris said. “It’s got to get found.”
With Google being the king of the search engine world, those who specialize in SEO are essentially learning to speak Google’s language as best they can, Harris said.
The goal for Harris and her clients is making sure a company’s website shows up on the first page of search results and stays there. A website that falls onto the second page of a search or worse is far less effective, she said.
Search Intelligence
Harris and others in her line of work analyze what sorts of search terms people are using to search for websites and try to find the best keywords to use in HTML coding and content of a website.
It is important for a website to be linked to phrases that people are actually searching for, she said.
And with many Americans now familiar with search engines, the phrases they use are getting longer and more complex, she said, which keeps the SEO industry on its toes.
Ken Leenhouts, manager of SEO and social media at Natick-based Advanced Media Productions, said that SEO is an investment of time compared to the immediate but more temporary results of paid search engine listings.
“You need to really be patient with SEO,” Leenhouts said. “It’s not an overnight type of deal.”
The reason for that is partly because of the algorithm Google uses to rank websites. Virtually no website is going to go from a low ranking to a high ranking overnight.
The Google algorithm has 200 factors it uses to rank websites and nobody outside of Google knows them all, Leenhouts said, though some firms specialize in experimenting with different SEO methods to see which ones affect rankings.
But Google isn’t too shy about sharing. The company makes a good deal of information on SEO matters available at www.google.com/webmasters.
Age of a domain, keywords, traffic and the number of “back links” — which are links to a website hosted on a different website — all factor into the ever-evolving Google algorithm.
Sometimes companies get caught breaking Google’s rules in order to achieve a high ranking.
JC Penney was admonished by Google earlier this year for using “black hat” SEO methods to achieve a high search ranking. That means the company’s SEO contractor placed links to JC Penney on other websites that were unrelated to retail or had no purpose other than to be “link farms.”
That is against Google’s rules, and JC Penney’s search ranking suffered as a result, according to The New York Times, which broke the story in February.
But it’s not just retailers like JC Penney that are jockeying for the top spot on a Google search result page.
Both Harris and Leenhouts said competition is particularly stiff for those in the real estate and legal services industries.
Those two industries can both make a lot of money for each new client they attract, said Leenhouts, who has taken on attorneys as SEO clients. So it makes sense that they would want the highest visibility possible.
Leenhouts said that it takes time and persistent effort using SEO to get an attorney’s website to the top of a search.
“Finding a lawyer in Worcester these days is like finding a needle in a needle stack,” he said.
WBJ Web Partners
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