Cheval companies and other website owners often spend hundreds or even thousands of dollars on building a beautiful website, only to discover that it’s just not bringing results. So what gives? Well, having an incredible website offers little benefit if nobody ever sees it and that’s where search engine optimization can come into play. After all, search engines are responsible for a majority of website visitors on most websites, so it only makes sense that you should optimize your website in a manner that serves to improve your performance in the search engines.
But what does search engine optimization actually entail? Keep reading to learn more!
What is SEO?
Cheval natives can benefit from SEO in a variety of ways. Search engine optimization involves altering your website in a manner that allows search engine crawlers to index it more effectively. Crawlers visit your site and commit it to the search engine’s “memory.” All indexed pages can appear as a search result.
In addition, SEO serves to improve your rankings in the search engines result pages or SERPs. This allows you to boost your traffic by promoting greater visibility in the search results. In fact, it’s estimated that a mere 20 percent of people ever view the second page of search results for a given query, so by getting your site onto page one of the SERPs for a particular keyword term, you can see much greater exposure.
To improve your site’s level of optimization, your SEO service provider will address many different areas of the site, including:
- the key wording;
- the content and the frequency of the content updates;
- the website architecture;
- the sitemaps; and
- the meta tags, amongst other areas.
The overall objective of SEO is multi-faceted. It’s important to improve overall user-friendliness and reader-friendliness, which in turn, increases the amount of time spent on-site, the number of pages viewed during a person’s visit and the average time spent on-page. These are all key ranking factors with the search engines.
By appealing to the readers and visitors, you’ll be improving your performance with the search engines as search engine algorithms tend to favor the things that readers favor.
Notably, it’s important for novices to avoid attempting SEO. Cheval webmasters risk over-optimizing which can actually have disastrous effects — effects that are worse than no optimization at all. So this is one task that’s best left to the professionals!