The SEO Ranking Expert

SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimization“. This means many things to different people but, put simply, it’s the art of doing things to your website so that it ranks high in the search engines for your desired keywords.

We’re starting at the very basics here, so forgive me if I speak too plainly. But we have to define keywords. By “keywords” we mean a word or phrase that someone would be searching Google for. Someone might be searching for “buy red pontiac grand am dayton ohio” or “seo expert buffalo“. (And when we say Google, we’re sort of saying all search engines in general. Yeah there are other ones, but Google is still the big daddy. More on that in future posts.)

Not an SEO expert. Context is everything. (i.e. "seo expert buffalo")

Part of SEO is finding the best and juiciest keywords to rank for. Let’s say you have a company that does computer repair in Buffalo, NY. You would probably want your site to come up high in the search results when people search for, “computer repair buffalo ny”. By “best and juiciest” we mean keywords that people are actually looking for.

Books have been written just about the subject of what is called “keyword research“, but suffice to say for now that you would rather rank high for something that a lot of people are searching for. There is something else called “long tail keywords” where you target very specific terms that don’t have a ton of traffic but are easier to rank for.

There are many, MANY elements of search engine optimization. Some of these include placement and amount of keywords in the text of your website, keywords being used in the header tags, title tags, domain name and elsewhere. SEO can also include the way your site is built – the better it is, the easier that the search engines can index it. We’ll save the specifics for other posts, but just know that the tactics employed to bring your site to the top of the search rankings are many and varied.

Google is always changing the algorithm they use to determine their search results. The mechanics are never made public, so SEO experts just have to guess. A lot of research goes into this and there’s a lot that we’ve determined just by trial and error. Google also hints as to what’s “good SEO” and what isn’t.

A great SEO consultant can help you understand what Google wants and how to tweak things and create content that the search engines will like. You can have the best-looking and most functional website in the world, but if it’s not optimized for your desired keywords, you’re missing out on a huge amount of traffic – and likely a ton of money.

One of the things that makes us different as SEO consultants is that we take the time to help you understand what we’re doing and why we’re doing it. That way YOU can take control of your SEO results. We believe SEO works best when the website/business owner is involved in the ongoing process of creating content.

We’re barely scratching the surface here, but hopefully this helped someone out! Hit us up if you ever have questions on things we may have missed that we haven’t posted about yet!