OSI Local
OSI Local | Orange County SEO Company
Anyone who has a website for their business or does a lot of work online will inevitably run into the term "search engine optimization" or "SEO" for short. Most people understand that anyone talking about SEO services in Orange County is talking about getting their website to rank at or near the top of the major search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing. While that general understanding is common, how can we dig into the term "SEO" and understand what it really means?
Search Engine Optimization is a broad term, but at its essence this is the process by which a website can be made to look good in the eyes of search engines. By creating a website that makes them happy, it will appear higher in the natural (sometimes referred to as "organic") results and, therefore, be seen by a lot more people.
The first thing to understand is that SEO is fluid. The rules that could get you ranked at the top back in 2002 are completely different than 2008, and those are completely different than today in 2015. In other words, as technology and the online world evolves, so do the rules that help dictate who gets seen and who gets buried.
There are also many different factors that go into ranking. While no one reveals all the various things that go into ranking, over 200 different factors have been identified as having an effect on how Google ranks a website. Some have a bigger effect than others, but all of them are important.
Just a few of the major factors that all the major search engines take into account when ranking your site include:
- High-quality original content
- Authoritative content
- Age of the domain
- Quality of website coding
- High-quality contextual backlinks
- Trustworthiness of information
- Location (especially for locally-based searches)
These are just a few of the major factors, and they can be positive or negative in their effect. For example, having a ton of content can be a good thing or a bad thing. Generally more content is a good thing, but it needs to be original content that adds value. If it's not, then that can actually be a black mark.
Backlinks are another example. Natural backlinks that come from a strong website in a similar field can do wonders to shoot your website up the rankings. On the other hand, any spammy links or manipulative backlinks can have an extremely negative effect on where your website gets viewed, no matter what else you are doing right.
In other words, it's important to build a good website with valuable content and clean coding, but don't go so far that you try to manipulate where you end up, or you might have the opposite effect.
Understanding SEO and how it works, and how it changes, is an important part of getting any website the attention it deserves whether a blog, a large authority website or even the website of a small local business. Learning these skills will always pay off!
For more information about us, be sure to visit us on sites like Blogger, Twitter, Pinterest, Facebook & Gravatar.
