DAVID BYRDEN
SEO explained | David Byrden
What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?
If you don't know what SEO is, or whether you need it, I will try to explain.
Websites have many roles. Ask yourself if your website is an advertisement. Should it bring you new customers, who didn't already know of your business? If so, then you need SEO.
Now, consider how people look for goods and services on the Web. They usually start at a search engine, such as Google. They feed it a brief description of their needs, e.g. "hotel in Vienna", and it shows them a list of websites.
SEO means getting the best possible position on this list.
Your position is important because the customer will read the list from the beginning. If your competitors are listed above you, the customer may choose them without ever seeing your website.
So, how can you improve your position? A search engine tries to arrange websites by their relevance to the request. But, as a computer program, it cannot visit hotels or restaurants; it can only read their website pages.
The key to improving your position is the text you put in your pages, and how you arrange them.
An SEO consultant knows what the search engines like to see in a website. He or she will work with you to identify your desired visitors and the words that they search for. Based on that, he or she will help you to build suitable text and page structure. Although the results cannot be guaranteed, search engines should then give you a better position, bringing more new visitors to your website.
