Search Engine Optimization 101 There was a day when all a business needed to do was advertise his or her company in the yellow pages and they would have a packed store. In those days, the yellow pages were like a new technology, it was the Internet of this day. It allowed consumers to search the paper and find businesses.
We know now that the yellow pages and newspapers are all passe. Print media marketing is almost a dead media. No one runs to the yellow pages or newspaper in the middle of the night when they have a plumbing emergency, they hop on Google and call the first company they find that offers the service they need.
Search Engine Optimization is how YOU become the company that they find first. Literally do this test, type the name of your industry into Google and note if you find your companies name. If you are a plumber in NYC, then Google, “plumber NYC.”
Take note of all the companies that you do find on that page.
If you did not see your name on that first page of Google, you are losing out on a lot of money. Those companies that you did find are the ones who will get the business of the people who search Google to find services.
This applies for any business, not just plumbing because Google is the tool that everyone uses when they are looking for anything.
So what exactly is Search Engine Optimization? Well, search engine optimization is a list of techniques that help a website rank highly on Google. The higher your site is ranked, the more it is found by potential customers.
Simply having a site is not good enough. What good is a site that no one can find? The guy who is on page 3 is not going to get the same amount of customers as the guy on page.
Google is pretty much a popularity contest, where all the people who are on the first page are the cool kids and everyone on page 2 and beyond are the freaks and geeks.
But the Internet is created by nerds and in a strike of irony it is the nerds who decide what is popular on Google. Nerd owned and ran Search Engine Optimization companies fight it out to make their clients part of the cool kids and this is a never ending war. Someone is always vying for the number one spot, this is why the companies who sit and number one continue to do business with search engine optimization companies so that they can stay at number one.
As you can see, Google is a battle field and there is a contest war that determines who is ranked on the first page. The spoils of victory of this war are more customers and more money. Even once you are at the top of Google the battle continues. This was is fault with search engine optimization which is set of processes and techniques that help sites rank well on Google.