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Why SEO is Still Very Relevant in Boosting Your Business Visibility Ever felt the fear of losing someone in the crowd? As a young mother, my son was always keeping me on my toes to ensure he didn’t wander off somewhere while out shopping. I knew if he did, it would be very difficult to locate him amongst a sea of people – a very frightening thought for any parent! When it comes to our business, we certainly don’t want to be lost in a sea of competitors; as the founder of a digital marketing company, “standing out from the crowd” is always on the forefront of my mind for our clients. It can be tough these days; everyone has a website and most business owners have multiple competitors clamoring for the same potential client. What can a business owner do to be found in all that clutter? One way is the science (or as Daniel Simmons calls it: “the ART”) of Search Engine Optimization, or SEO for short. SEO refers to a suite of techniques used to make a website appear above others in various search engines. The goal is to optimize a set of conditions pertaining to a website enough to get higher rankings when potential clients are searching for solutions to their problems. Solutions that you can provide. This optimization requires a vast array of skills from an SEO expert but also things an entrepreneur and business owner can do. Some are straight forward such as writing informative and value-driven blog posts that provide answers for your ideal target market. Many other things involve the coding of the website itself, finding resource partners to share links with, and other services. It’s become one of the “it” areas of marketing and with good reason! Why? Search engine optimization, and search engine marketing (SEM) in general, can serve a number of different purposes. It can: * Produce sales, both online and offline * Generate qualified leads * Convince search engine users to follow through with your call to action, such as; signing up for your newsletter, downloading white papers from your site, registering for a webinar and so on. And while it is doing all this, your website’s prominent position on the search engine results pages (SERPs) contributes to branding and name recognition. When done correctly, search engine optimization can bring people to your site, who is actually looking for what you are offering. You know they’re looking for it because they typed in a keyword or phrase that is directly related to your content. Most consumers are really tired of being inundated with marketing everywhere they look, but are still receptive to the kind of “just-in-time” marketing represented by a high placement in search engine results. Years ago a web developer could simply stick a bunch of random, popular, but unrelated keywords into what is called the “keyword META” part of a website’s coding. These keywords would make the site seem more popular, broad, and important than it really was and diminished the ability of people using search engines to actually find what they were looking for. About a decade ago, the search engines really started to clamp down on those bad practices: after all, they were damaging the ability of the search engines to do their job! Now, it has become much more complicated and difficult to optimize your websites for search engines. The truth is, search engine traffic can make (or break) an organization’s success. Targeted visitors to a website can provide extra publicity, higher revenues, and brand exposure like no other form of marketing. Given this, investing in SEO, whether through spending money to have a professional do it, or spending time doing it yourself, can provide an exceptional rate of return. Here at eVision Media, we have the fortune of having a wonderful SEO expert: Daniel! He’s spent years honing his craft to make the websites he works with appear high up on those search engine lists but without reverting to “black hat” (negative) SEO tactics as they’re called, which are against the spirit of search engines. In fact, their robotic programs, that index websites, now punish you for poor practices. This is one area you really do need a professional! In his years of experience, Daniel has never had one website blacklisted by the search engines: A record he intends to keep, by the way! While SEO benefits can seem abstract, when you put it in the perspective of losing something valued to you in a crowd (such as your entire business website) the benefits really seem to shine.
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SEO, SEM, Marketing, Website SEO, Optimization, META, Title tags, Ad Words,
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