If you’re just starting up a website, or running a website and not seeing as much traffic as you’d like, you’ve probably heard of SEO, or, Search Engine Optimization. Some people promote SEO as though it were some magical tool to get you to the top of the Google search page. Unfortunately, it’s not. But, it can get you somewhere.
Basically, SEO is when an independent contractor or a company looks over your webpage to see where it might be being hurt by Google’s sorting algorithm. This algorithm is what determines where pages will be on the list of results. The higher you are, the better.
Things that bump your webpage up are good structure, links to other sites, and heavy keyword usage. If you can combine these things and other factors, you can get higher in Google’s search results. This is what SEO does.
So, how is SEO done? Who needs it? Will it really help? In this article, we’ll answer all of these questions and more.
How is SEO Done?
There are a couple of ways to do SEO- taking a DIY approach or hiring someone else to do it. There are advantages and disadvantages to both of these approaches, so you’ll want to weigh your choices accordingly.
DIY
You can, in fact, perform SEO on your own website, but it takes a tiny bit of expertise to really get it right. It’s not like you have to go to four years of SEO school, but you will want to watch a few videos online.
Luckily, there’s no shortage of ‘how to do SEO’ videos on the internet. A quick search on youtube will reveal just what you need.
It does, however, take a bit of an understanding as to how the Google Search algorithm works. If you feel uncomfortable with this, you might want to hire an outside contractor to come in and do your SEO for you. Computers aren’t everyone’s thing, so there’s no shame.
Also, if your SEO doesn’t work, which it likely won’t the first time, you’re going to have to do a lot of searching around for what might be wrong and how to improve upon it. This is more time invested and a higher likelihood you may not be able to recover your investment.
That’s why DIY SEO is a little bit of an endurance game. You’ve got to make sure you can tough it out and work out the kinks, or you could end up with a website structure that services you even worse on Google Search algorithms.
So, stick it through, find good information on SEO, and this method could work for you.
Hire a Contractor
If you’re not comfortable with computers and don’t want to spend your time learning about SEO, this may be the way for you. Keep in mind, though, there are costs associated with it, so you’ll want to lay out cost and benefit accordingly.
If your website is already pretty high on Google’s search results, then you’ll probably want to optimize yourself. True, you could lose your place by making bad changes, but hiring a whole new contractor likely won’t do much because you won’t be able to push past the really big giants.
Contractors have their biggest benefits for small websites who just can’t figure out why their posts aren’t drawing any attention. Likely, if you’re buried in the Google Search pages, you’ve got some inadequacies in your page construction. SEO optimizers can find these and help boost you up.
That’s not to say they can get you to the very top or bring you all the customers you want, but they can help.
If an optimizer’s work doesn’t actually pan out and you don’t see any improvements, though, you may have wasted a bunch of money. This is especially true considering the fact that you likely won’t know what the optimizer did to get you where you are.
Not to mention, when you hire someone you take the process out of your own hands. In this case, it’s good to trust fully whoever you’re employing. That doesn’t mean there are a whole bunch of scammy SEO contractors, but it does mean you should do a little snooping before hiring.
Does it Work?
That question is complicated because SEO success depends on a number of factors. If you’ve got a great website with great content that just needs a little boost, SEO will likely be great for you. It depends on how good the SEO contractor you’ve hired is, though.
For small websites, SEO can be a real godsend. Getting backlinks to other sites, high keyword saturation, and other such necessities into your website can definitely boost you on the search results.
But it’s not guaranteed.
In the end, SEO optimizers aren’t working with a set equation that will generate high visitor upticks every time. They’re going through and looking at all your website’s minute factors to see what can be tweaked. It’s a game of little things, so it’s largely just a matter of ‘wait and see’ in the end.
That doesn’t sound very convincing, but that’s the way the internet is. People will only go to your site if they see it, and they’ll only see it if it has all the best website features.
So, if you’re wary about SEO, just remember this- no company ever put out an ad in 100% certainty that it would work. Sometimes ad campaigns flop, and sometimes SEO wasn’t what you needed.
In the end, though, it can definitely work if you get a good optimizer or follow all the recommendations you see on an SEO instruction video or website.
All in All
All in all, SEO is a way to boost your website’s visitorship by moving it up in the Google Search results. You can do it yourself, or you can hire somebody. In any case, success is a matter of how diligently you worked and, of course, a bit of luck.
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