Search Engine Optimization
Search engine optimization is important for any business seeking to expand its customer base and become more visible. Page ranks are constantly evolving, and it’s crucial that you have the ability to take advantage of that. Being on the all-important first page is the best way to find prospective customers or clients — and keep them too. Over the last decade, SEO itself has changed greatly. There are more advancements in the field as well as better policing of less savory methods for attracting traffic.
There are a wide range of practices that search optimizers use to improve page rank and visibility. These include, but are not limited to social media marketing, email marketing, referral marketing, content marketing, native advertising and sponsored advertising. SEO is complex cocktail of everything from coding a website to maximize search relevance to getting indexed on the first page of search engine results. The right combination, with the right team can result in, well, pretty amazing search engine traffic.
Now, a lot of search engine optimizers will promise this — and the world. As SEO has grown as a marketing strategy, so has the number of deceptive, illusory, and downright shady companies or con artists. For those familiar with SEO, you’ll recognize these immediately as “Black hat” methods. Too many business fall for Black hat SEO salesmen, often ending up banned, or eliminated from rank and listings.
That’s why your company needs an SEO strategy that is firmly “White hat”. At it’s core, SEO should be about the user or customer, and directing them to wherever and whatever they need, to your business. Quality SEO should produce long term, reliable results, and ensure that the content on your website matches search engine indexes and rank. It isn’t supposed to be tricking the search engine’s algorithm or the user searching for information. In fact, it’s really another facet of exceptional web development, with the overall goal of improving accessibility.
So with that information in mind, white hats on.