Why is SEO important for your website?

All major search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing have such results, where web pages and local listings are shown and ranked based on what the search engine considers most relevant to users looking for a specific service or product. If you own a website, search results matter! When your pages have higher rankings, they help more people to find your website when searching. If you want your pages to have high rankings, you need to make sure that your website has the ingredients, search engines need for their algorithm recipe. What is the algorithm? It is a process of set rules to be followed in calculations or problem-solving operations by a computer. So I like to think of it like this - Google has a secret recipe/process it needs to follow to give the users exactly what they are searching for. Your website needs to have the ingredients needed so that it can rank high enough for the user to find you.

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Although the recipe is secret, most of the big ingredients are known and here are the most popular:
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1. Words - every word you write gets accounted for by the search engine. Because there are thousands of websites and it would be almost impossible for you to find yourself a hairdresser online without searching for it using Google, when you type in Hairdresser, Google will narrow the results for you and only show you the pages most relevant to that search.

2. Titles - every page of your website must have a title which in short, describes all the information on that page. Like a book title, you won't open the book and read it if you do not find the title attractive enough. The official title of your page will not be seen by the public because it is in the coding of your website, but for Google and other search engines, this is very important to find your page.

3. Links - when your website gets a link from another website, Google sees this as a recommendation - meaning your website contains a lot of good stuff that will be relevant to the person searching for your product or website. The more links you have to your website, the more relevant Google will see it. Do not be fooled by buying thousands of links by the click of one button, they do not carry enough weight in the algorithm recipe like a link from a trustworthy website. So thousands of links might only carry the amount weight of one GOOD link to your website - without it having to cost you anything.

4. The words used in links - when you are creating copy for your website or blog, and on your contact us page you have a link that goes to another page in your website, the word that is linked should be the word most relevant to your website. This way, when customers search for your product/service, your website will rank high because you are linking with the relevant word people search for. Although this is just the basics, do keep in mind the recipes for different search engines are defined and changed all the time. Good SEO is about making sure your website is populated with great fresh content on a continuous rhythmic basis. This content must be supported by the list of ingredients search engines need to find your website. Should you require assistance with setting up SEO for your website then contact us here.