Ever changing technology has created unfamiliarity among many business owners – unfamiliarity with how to connect with clientele online.
“There’s a disconnect between how people want their brands portrayed and what gets displayed on the Internet,” stated Gabriel Lee, President, Noteworthy SEO. Business owners that don’t remain current with the gyrations of technology tend to struggle with creating and maintaining an Internet presence that places their business or service at the top of a given search result.
Effective search engine optimization (SEO) enables businesses to rank higher in search results. Since the use of printed directories is becoming less relevant, online searches have become one of the few ways businesses can be instantly found by consumers.
75 per cent of all online queries are conducted via Google, making Google a highly desirable search engine to rank in. “Statistically, most people don’t look past the first page of a search result, so you want to be on the front page and as close to the top as possible,” explained Lee.
Lee has developed a simple acronym to help companies achieve the minimum requirements needed to rank in search engines: UMAC.
URL
A uniform resource locator (URL) is a digital address or reference to an Internet resource. The first criterion Google examines is your URL. Including keywords in a URL will make your website more likely to rank in search results.
For example, including the words “free comprehensive site report” in a URL will increase ranking potential when users search for these keywords.
Meta Tags & Meta Descriptions
Meta tags and meta descriptions serve the purpose of explaining what each web page is about. They allow Google to identify web page topics when searching for information requested by a user.
For instance, Lee describes his homepage as “premier SEO and Internet marketing in St. Albert and Edmonton,” which improves Noteworthy SEO’s search rankings.
Anchor Text
Anchor text is what appears highlighted in a hypertext link on a web page and is used to open target web pages when clicked. Where they’re placed within a website, what they link to and the types of anchor text that link back to your website will all impact your search ranking.
Content
Finally, content is pivotal. You need to have enough content to ensure your website isn’t identified as insignificant or “spammy,” as well as relevant keywords to improve your ranking in search engine results.
“You can have an online ‘calling card’ that you direct people to, but being found when people search on Google is an entirely different thing,” asserted Lee. SEO gives businesses an opportunity to be found because they’re following a path that has been laid out by search engines to rank highly.
Lee shared these insights (and a whole lot more) with a group of eager guests during a recent NABI-hosted lunch and learn. If you’re fired up about improving your search results, stay tuned for Lee’s next presentation in October or contact him at: Gabriel Lee, 780.700.0254, noteworthyseo.com