SEO is a term that gets thrown around a lot these days. Many people talk about it, but few really understand what it means or why its important. SEO can stand for Search Engine Optimizer – a person, or Search Engine Optimization – a process.
Truly, it’s an umbrella term that can include making a website search engine friendly via search engine optimization, pay per click advertising, inbound link building, article and press release marketing and more. The goal of SEO is to put your website in view of qualified leads, those who are searching online for what you offer. SEO is a process that involves time and effort to achieve higher page rankings.
Inspired 2 Design is often contacted by someone looking for advertising or design services, who’s found our website on one or another search engine, and that’s really where all the hard work of SEO pays off. Recently we updated our website. We streamlined the pages and links, updated the colors and page configurations for consistency, we checked links to ensure the entire site was crawlable, we revisited the content, added new clients, portfolio samples and other “New Year’s” house cleaning. But one other, very important thing we did was to review our keyword usage.
To update keywords we did a few things. First we took time to review our content for accuracy, readibility, and importance. Then we reviewed the words used in the content to pull out the associated keywords that potential customers would use to search for a company like ours. We then checked those keywords for competition and usage. Once all that data was compiled, we could make educated decisions on the keywords we wanted to use on our pages and in our metatags. Each page of our site received the same treatment and it took a few days to complete each one.
That’s all just one part of SEO, there’s so much more to it…but that’s a story for another day.