The beginner’s guide to SEO – a web design company in NYC unravels the mystery.

Part One of a series – What is Search Engine Optimization?

There are a growing number of businesses, large and small, offering search engine optimization services in New York, and any business owner will be sure to nod sagely when asked just how important SEO is as part of a company’s digital marketing strategy. They will tell you that their digital marketing team is highly focused on SEO and that every web design company in NYC needs to ensure all aspects of a site are appropriately optimized.

But ask the same person to explain what SEO really means – how it is measured, what benefits it brings and how you can go about improving it, and you are likely to be greeted by vague allusions to keywords, backlinks and using tools like Google Adwords. As far as concrete insights go, you will probably be none the wiser.

We have decided to strip away the buzzwords and take a first- principles look at SEO. We’ll demystify the concept and help every business form a clear picture of what they need to do to get the best out of their overall SEO strategy. We’ll examine this at every stage, from how they engage with their web design company in NYC through using the most appropriate content writing services in New York to exploring tools such as social media outreach and pay per click strategies.

But in this first installment, we will start at the beginning. Let’s get clear on what we mean by SEO and why it is so important.

Getting friendly with Google

With every passing day, another book is published with another definition of SEO. For our purposes, let’s keep it simple and break down the phrase. Optimizing your website for search engines means adopting strategies to make the site “search engine friendly” and therefore causing it to rank higher in the results page when someone types an appropriate search into Google.

Of course, there are other search engines out there, and while some strategies need to be tailored to specific engines, most will have a similar impact across the board. So when we talk about attracting the Google web crawlers, we are also thinking about Bing, Yahoo and the rest.

Even these few words should have got you thinking. Two questions which might spring immediately to mind are what do we mean by someone keying in an appropriate search and what qualities will make your site more attractive to the Google algorithm than that of your competitor down the road?

Why does it matter?

We will explore both those questions in detail, but first, let’s think about why it matters. Here’s the thing: The internet is a big place. Bigger than you might realize. The total number of websites in existence is approaching two billion, and approximately 200 new sites are born every minute.

No matter how great a job your web design company in New York does to create your site, it will all be for nothing if nobody sees it. Getting traffic to your website is the be all and end all of your digital presence. It increases brand recognition, sales, and customer loyalty. And the single most influential way of increasing traffic to your site is to get it ranking higher on those search engine results pages.

Search engines are unlike any other tool in that they will send targeted traffic to your site. In other words, people who are looking for exactly the product or service you offer. SEO is the act of educating the search engines as to what that product or service is, and then convincing them that your site provides a better answer to the search queries people are keying in than anyone else.

In the next installment, we will look in some more detail at how search engines “think” to understand the logic behind the SEO techniques that have been developed over recent years.