by, whitney grimes

SEO – seemingly the three biggest letters in the English language; these three letters could be your website’s golden ticket.

What is SEO?

Search Engine Optimization. I know, you’re probably looking at the computer screen right now with your head tilted at a 60 degree angle slowly uttering the word, “Right…” So, let’s break it down – Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the religious execution of improving and promoting your website, not just for search engine’s (Google, Bing, Yahoo!) but people too, with an end goal to ultimately increase visitors to your site!

SEO is essentially a vital mix of ingredients on the backend of your site (coding etc.), the front end of your site (what the user encounters) and a small mixture of additional drivers like social media and third party sites with backlinks and inbound links.

It’s all in the recipe

Think of SEO as a recipe – for the sake of the example let’s go with banana nut bread. You need the right amount of specific ingredients to make banana nut bread, right? You can’t just take a bunch of bananas and flour, mix them vigorously for two minutes, bake at 375 and wahlah – banana nut bread. While this would be a seemingly interesting concoction it would not even be close to the results you were looking for; translation, you slap some words on your site that are meaningful to you, you Google your site, it doesn’t come up – failed (banana nut bread) recipe.

Why do I need SEO?

Why do you need bananas in banana nut bread? Because without it – the bread would just be nut bread and therefore pointless; again, a website devoid of SEO is just that – pointless.

Search engines such as Google, Yahoo! and Bing will be top drivers in traffic to your website and driving traffic to your site is key. Search engines are unique in that they deliver the user what they are searching for. By optimizing your site (with SEO) you’re essentially prepping it to be found in a library of other websites. Telling search engines, ‘When some one searches for banana nut bread recipes – land them here, my information is the most relevant.’

If search engines cannot find your site or add your content to their databases – because you’ve not done any SEO, you miss out on opportunities to drive traffic to your site. In this case, a potentially mind-blowing banana nut bread recipe…or to put it bluntly for business owners, customers!

Doesn’t Google Know Everything?

Can banana nut bread bake in the sun? No. The sun has power to transfer heat but it cannot bake on it’s own, just as Google has the power to find, it cannot search for things it isn’t aware of.

Search engines are smart, but they still need help. The major engines are always working to improve technology in order to search the web and deliver more pertinent information to its users.

In addition to making content available to search engines, SEO also helps boost rankings so that content will be placed where users will more readily find it. The Internet is becoming increasingly competitive, and companies who perform SEO will have an advantage against similar businesses.

The Last Bite

Just as bananas are the essential ingredient in banana nut bread, SEO is the essential ingredient for your website (yes there’s paid ads, but you still need SEO and the paid ads/food analogy blog will come at another time).

SEO is all about finding the keywords, terms and phrases that generate traffic to your website, making it friendly to search engines and building links to market the unique value of it.

That’s what Muse Group is here to do. Get you found. Make you money. Build a successful business.

So, grab a slice of banana nut bread, a tall glass of SEO and Muse with us.