Whenever you search for something using a search engine, which links do you generally click? The first few links on the very first page of the results, right? Seldom would you move over to the next page in search of more websites. The point is, there are usually hundreds of thousands of websites that match any search, but only the first few results get attention. That means, if your website doesn’t show up in those top few results, search engines will not be sending potential customers your way. And that’s a serious issue for any web business!
Of course, we could make use of Search Engine Marketing (SEM) to show up on the search engine page, but who wouldn’t want to save on advertising cost if possible? Unlike SEM, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of trying to rank high in search engine result pages without having to pay for it. It is the art of trying to get traffic through natural and unpaid means, also known as organic traffic.
When users search for content, search engines attempt to serve them with web pages that are most relevant to their query. The aim of SEO then, is to convince the search engines that the pages on your website are the best and most relevant in comparison to the billions of other options on the Internet. Sounds like a daunting task, doesn’t it? Well, it sure is, when you are competing with the whole world in your quest to get to the top of the search engines.
There are a number of well-recognized tweaks, activities and processes that are known to improve the optimization of your website. However, tactics that worked yesterday may not work today, and tactics that are considered good today may get banned tomorrow. Search Engine Optimizers (SEOs) have to be constantly on their toes to know the current trends. For example, stuffing keywords in the “keywords” meta tag in HTML pages was once upon a time a well-known tactic. Today it has negligible effect, if any at all. Generating a large number of backlinks to your website rapidly was also a well-known and effective technique, which today is considered a grey area, with search engines keeping a careful watch on unnatural increase in such backlinks and even the relevance of those links. Using automated means of creating backlinks is now a risky matter, with the chances of irrelevant links getting your website black listed being high.
At Excelory, we employ a wide variety of tactics spanning the breadth and depth of white-hat SEO, while staying away from black-hat SEO that may boost short term results at the cost of long term sustainability. While the specifics of our SEO activity are kept confidential from general public, we do share selective details of our activities with our customers so that they know how we are going about optimizing their online presence. After carefully analyzing the keywords relevant to your business, we use a combination of on-page as well as off-site optimization techniques, while focusing on eliminating defects that are detrimental to SEO as well as carrying out new enhancements that would boost your rankings further.
As for accountability of the optimization process, initial results of the SEO exercises may be quite clearly visible, especially if you are starting from zero. During later stages of the exercise, however, it can take months before you can see significant results from the SEO process, making it difficult to map results to their corresponding actions. Also, seeing consistent results would be close to impossible, with results becoming increasingly difficult to quantify when you are competing with the best in the industry, especially your business competitors who are also actively employing SEO tactics to get to the top. Unlike SEM, it is difficult to prove the value of the SEO exercise. However, persistent SEO efforts are bound to give long term benefits that would last a long long time, and that can certainly be tracked and verified based on statistics.
In the recent years, search engines are known to be updating their algorithms quite often. Each time they make changes to their internal intelligence systems, everyone’s rankings could get affected overnight. The nature of the change in the search engines’ algorithms also brings up fresh opportunities to race to the top. Alternatively, not being active with SEO could imply negative consequences on your current rankings, because search engines may not see an increase in the value of your site and, besides, your competition would steadily race ahead of you. SEO is therefore a continual activity that no organization serious about its business can afford to ignore. Click here to claim your free consultation session and see what we can do for your business to get quality customers naturally.