SEO is an vitally important concept for businesses to be aware of for search engine placement in the major Search Engines (Google, Yahoo and MSN). The bottom line for any business and the bottom line of a business that conducts business on the web. SEO is designing and writing for optimum search engine placement.

Search Engines

I am only going to speak about the most important search engine and that is Google.

Why is SEO Important?

For a company to place well in the Search Engines is vital for running a profitable business. People usually won’t search further than the first page, maybe the second page and maybe they will go to the third page Google. If you are are lucky.

Although their techniques vary from different company to different company there are certain seo services that are fairly common to all of them and some of these traits include:

• Some form of content that is optimized so that the keywords that are written into the text will attract the search engines and supply you some rankings.

• A host of other techniques that are used including blog writing as a means of increasing traffic and conversions to sales.

And of course there are several expectations that business owners have when they hire one of these services and at the top of that list is of course search engine rankings.

Rankings

These rankings are at the top of everyone’s list when to comes to the things that they expect from a professional SEO firm and often the road to the top is not as straight as some of these business people might think. For example, it’s possible to get great rankings on certain keywords but not get much traffic to your site. All site owners need to remember that rankings take time and a constant effort to build up. Stopping any SEO campaign in the middle will result in a loss of any forward momentum that you have established. Still, there are some things that you can expect from an seo campaign with an accredited seo company and that’s generally a fair amount of conversions from traffic to sales even in the early stages.

Remember that in the final analysis, it’s the numbers that matter and any seo company should be able to help you with your bottom line provided that you’re willing to invest the time.

As you can see in the above image over 50% of the users click the first result returned by Google. Even more to that point, over 75% of the traffic goes to the top 3 results in the search engine meaning that these positions are the ones you need to be shooting for. If you aren’t placing in the top 3 you are potentially missing out on a lot of free “organic” traffic.

So I’m sure by now you are thinking how can I get into these top 3 spots and that’s a great question. There are a number of factors which influence where your site will lie within the SERPs and they can be broken down into two main categories: Internal and External.

When I say Internal, I mean things within your own site that you can modify. A few things you need to pay attention to are your page titles, meta-keywords, cleanliness of your html code and keyword use within your sites content. If you want to rank for a specific keyword you need to use it in your websites title, meta-keywords as well your website’s content.

Externally you can increase your site’s search engine ranking by having people link to your website using your keyword as the anchor text. For example, if you are targeting the keyword “dog collars” have people link to your website using “dog collars” as the link’s text. Additionally it helps if the site linking to you is related to your site’s theme.

All these factors and more can influence your website’s ranking and simply making these changes cannot guarantee a high placement in the search engines. However it’s important to make note of these things and strive for those top spots in order to drive more traffic to your site. Good luck!