#1Why is SEO important?

Your website is basically a portal to your business and you no doubt spent considerable time deciding how you want your website to look and what to feature on it. Now that that’s done, you want people to see it, right? How do most people find websites? They use search engines, such as Google. They type in words, AKA key terms that they hope will bring up a list of websites that are relevant to what they’re looking for.

As an example, supposed you’re looking for new flooring for your home and you live in Kelowna BC, what would you type in for key terms? Most likely you would type in  something like “flooring stores in Kelowna”  This would than bring up flooring stores, and bingo bango, the first few websites listed will most likely get clicked on, the rest WILL NOT. Wow!

That’s why you need SEO, you want to make sure that if you’re a flooring store, you have web copy related to “flooring store Kelowna”, written in as many places as you can throughout your website. So tip #1 is write great content that key word dense information throughout the language.  You want to write copy that is relevant to your business that contains come of the key terms you want to be found by.  Putting “flooring store kelowna” throughout the website will not bring you good traffic.  You need to have a balance of well written content, but also key word dense copy.

#2 Can I do it myself and manage the Internal or On Page SEO?

You should be able to do some SEO yourself, provided you have a website that you can log into and update its content; otherwise you’re at the mercy of your marketing agency and their hourly billing. This is one of many reasons all “Search” clients can easily log in and update their own websites. The key to doing SEO yourself is writing content that features key terms that people are searching for.

#3 How much should I budget for it?

To answer that question, you must first establish goals. Is your goal to be on top locally? Or do you want to be #1 in all of Canada or the world for that matter?

There’s much more to SEO than writing relevant content, there are many other things that need to be done if your goal is a bit grander. Another consideration is local competition. Do many of your competitors do a good job on SEO? If so, you’ll need to do a better job.

Writing blog articles on your website can really help increase your web presence and if you’re not a prolific writer you need to hire someone to write for you, and often. This is yet another reason our “Search” program comes complete with easy to use blogging tools that let our clients work for themselves and save money.

External SEO is very important for the success of an optimization campaign.  What is external SEO (Search Engine Optimization) you might ask?  This is when where we submit your site to other websites, directories, e-zines, and more.  It involves exchanging linking structures between various websites to boost page rank and create an overall heavier weight in Google and other search engines.  There are many different external SEO techniques which we handle internally at SEARCH.   Learning how to do external SEO can be very time consuming and frustrating as it is changing all of the time.  It is best to have an expert do the work.   You wouldn’t try to build your house if you weren’t a home builder, and SEO is no different.

Why should I get going on SEO now?  Internet marketing is becoming more and more competitive every day and the longer you wait the harder / more expensive it will be to try and gain position in the search engines.  The time to get started on SEO is now before your competition gains the upper hand.

The answer in many cases is a technique and processing method called, HDR. The HDR method AKA high dynamic range, takes a minimum of three pictures of different exposures and fuses them into one great photo with everything in focus and no blown out lights or dark corners. For your next step in photography why not look into HDR. You can try Photomatix it’s what we use here at “Search”.