SEO, or Search Engine Optimization is the process of creating a page that the search engines like Google and Yahoo deem to be “of value”. These site that they deem to be valuable will show up toward the top of the SERPs or Search Engine Results Pages. The goal of SEO is to receive the most free traffic, or number of visitors, to your site for the desired keyword. The goal is to make your site the most relevant to the keywords that your potential client is searching for.
The search engines are more sophisticated now then they were in the past. They use a myriad of different factors to determine how your site should rank in the search engines. They use a process called Referential Integrity* to determine how sites should rank. Now you don’t need to know what referential integrity is, but I do. And understanding how the search engines like Google rank sites will help your site appear at the top of the rankings more frequently for your desired keywords.
Why is this beneficial? What if someone in your area is searching for “hardware store? There are 3 ways to rank within search engine results page. Let go through them.
One is a pure organic ranking. This is taking all of the websites Google or the others has stores and then ranking them by the particular keyword that the user searches. This is the most broad search, because it only can take into account the keyword that the user types in.
Organic Search Listing
The second is the Local Search Results. These sub-results are embedded within the normal results page but search engines like Google take into account the location of the user. YourLocalSite is based in Baton Rouge Louisiana. Look below, Google has identified my location my the ip address of my computer, and displayed hardware stores that it has determined is located in and around Baton Rouge. This is GREAT for local businesses but you must know how to tell the search engines that you are HERE! Otherwise they will not know where your business is located.
Competitive Analysis
When I do competitive analysis I basically reverse engineer your competitors websites that appear at the top of the search engines for your desired keywords. I not only study what your competitors have done to rank well in the search engines but I also integrate our own techniques to give your site that extra push to the top of the search engines. To help illustrate the point look below to see how most people view the internet and how our company views the internet and can intern give you the competitive advantage. Below is how you and most other view the internet.
This is how me and my company view the internet and your competitors… do you think this will give you and your company an advantage?
Local Listing
The third is the Paid Search Engine Listing. Paid search is based on a CPC or Cost Per Click basis. Unlike the Organic Listing where the traffic to your site is “Free”, CPC requires the site owner to pay for all of the traffic generated using this channel. The advantages of this is that the site owner can target their customers by specific keywords and place a specific ad that will display when the user/ potential client search that keyword. Your ads will be displayed within the outlined section below when you use CPC.
Paid or CPC Listing
This is the listing that the site owner not only target what the user types in (keyword) but also by the users location (State, City, Zip Code, English Speaking Countries) called CPC or Cost Per Click. This requires an entirely different type of skill sets by the site designer because the way the site is structured and the content on the site will determine the actual cost of each click and the placement of the ad on the page. The top ad and 1st ad on the right site of the page will get far more clicks than any other ad on the page, so its very important to design the site to have the lowest cost-per-click and the highest ranking. This is something that the YourLocalSite.com team knows how to do!
*Referential Integrity in a relational database is consistency between coupled tables. More formally referred to as Declarative Referential Integrity (DRI), referential integrity is usu…
