Clair-Mel is home to some very successful companies, but gone are the days of targeting customers or clients in the immediate region. Today, the internet provides companies with an opportunity to connect with clients and customers worldwide via the web.
But in order to leverage the internet to its full potential, you need a great website; one that is optimized to reach its full potential in the search engines, thereby generating the most possible traffic.
What is SEO?
Clair-Mel companies can see some significant benefits from search engine optimization services, which are designed to fulfill the over-arching goal of enhancing the website’s performance in the search result pages or SERPs. This is achieved by making the website appealing and user-friendly to visitors, while also optimizing elements that are directly related to the website’s interactions with search engines, such as crawlers, which scan a website and commit it to “memory” – a process called indexing. Once indexed, a webpage is eligible to appear in the search results.
Improving a website’s user appeal and user-friendliness is essential because this impacts a variety of different key elements that are heavily weighted by search engines, including:
- the average amount of time spent on-site;
- the bounce rate;
- the average number of pages visited while on-site;
- the average amount of time spent on each page; and
- the proportion of traffic that comes from returning visitors vs. first-time visitors.
These factors have been identified as critical indicators of a site’s overall quality. The higher a site’s quality, the better it will rank in the SERPs.
SEO also involves the optimization of a number of other website elements, including meta tags, key wording and keyword density, sitemaps, interlinking, website architecture and backlinks. The content plays a major role in your site’s search engine performance, making content a central element of any SEO operation. Your content must be engaging, user-friendly, well-key worded and unique (i.e. it hasn’t been published elsewhere online). The more often your site is updated with new content, the better it will perform in the search engines.
When hiring a firm to oversee SEO, Clair-Mel companies must remember that optimization is not a one-time project. It must be performed on a continual basis to ensure maximum results. This is especially important when you consider that search engines change their ranking algorithms on a very frequent basis, which means that the best practices for optimization may also change.
Many make the mistake of attempting to perform search engine optimization on their own, but this can backfire badly because a website that’s over-optimized will often perform far worse than a site without any optimization at all!