In this series of blogs on the importance of seo for small business owners, I am going to explain seo from the basics, go on to elaborate on how powerful a tool it is for marketing, reveal how small business owners can use it to their benefit and finally, give helpful tips on reaching the No.1 position in Google with the help of seo. I begin Part 1 of the series with this aim and hope that you gain a clear idea about it by the time we reach Part 10.
What is SEO?
The internet is so full of Search Engine Optimization information that it can easily overwhelm one if the basics are not clear. Some overrate it, some fail to appreciate it and some are totally confused by it. So, I decided to start from the basics, explain everything about it and then let’s say, let you decide if it can be helpful to you.
SEO is an acronym for Search Engine Optimization. And what exactly is it? Well, it is the procedure of designing and formulating independent web pages or web sites with fitting seo tools and techniques so that they can be noticed, scrutinized and indexed accordingly by the Search Engines.
Search Engines index websites and rank them as per some specific search algorithms that they follow. How much adherence a website pays to these algorithms and how seo friendly it has been made – any website’s chance of making it to the top or vice versa is determined by these two. Well, obviously any businessman, big or small would always want his website to stay at the top as you can well imagine how much traffic a No.1 ranking website can pull in as opposed to one which stays at the bottom. And hence, SEO is that little work-out regime that you must implement if you want your potential customers to know that your business exists. If you have a florist outlet in Denver, imagine what a keyword search of “buy fresh flowers Denver” can do to your sales, if you are standing at No.1 in Google and your website is optimized with that keyword. Although there are a number of search engines in the web world, the reason I’m mentioning Google is primarily because it owns almost 80% of the total share of search engine market and if your website manages a high rank here, it automatically makes it to the top in the rest.
So, SEO is the perfect place to begin your advertising and you can never go wrong if you do that right. If you own a small business, it is more so, because, small business endeavors, more often than not, are lacking in large marketing budgets and the best marketing strategy for advertising and boosting sales here can be SEO and SEO only.
Ignoring SEO is like putting up a shop without a signboard or a banner – your customers just pass by your shop, without an inkling that you exist somewhere. So should you rate it as important then? Think about it, and I will come back again with Part 2 and explain why seo is a MUST for small business success.
This is basic knowledge about SEO that can be helpful to any newbie in this field. Sometimes I forget the time when I was starting out and didn’t know what SEO meant or what it was used for. It’s good to remember that not all of us know what this means. Good work on Part 1!