The odds of a new customer randomly finding your site are greater than a lightning strike – actually about one in one trillion.  The odds go up if they are searching for your product or service specifically.  But they can go up even further if you concentrate on helping the search engines find you.  Search Engine Optimization – SEO – is a process that helps determine how likely it is that NEW customers will find your website. 

Your existing customers find your website by searching for your company name.  Because they KNOW the company name it narrows down the search parameters considerably.  Not knowing your company, potential new customers will search using generic terms – known as organic search terms – to find the particular product or service that you offer.  By helping the search engines find you with organic search terms, you help new customers find your site.

Search engines look for two important things:  website content and links.  For content, the search engine wants to see a large amount with key terms repeated over several pages.  But more than that, the search engine can tell if your website is dynamic – not static – if the content changes regularly.  If you update your site regularly, say by blogging or posting articles consistently, the search engine will see the activity pattern and will be more likely to check back frequently to look for new items.  This is a big plus for your page ranking.

And for links, the search engine can determine if visitors are actively reading your pages, sharing the pages with friends, or referring to your site in discussion boards and chat rooms.  This activity will be shown in the number of unique visitors that link to your content.  To accomplish this, you want to make sure that your content is interesting and helpful to visitors.  And above all, that your content is relevant to your business.  You want people to rely on your site when they need information about your topic.

To focus on SEO content, make sure that your site is dynamic, accurate, and interesting.  Use articles, blog entries, podcasts and surveys.  Encourage visitors to comments, and offer to sign them up for newsletters or comment feeds.  Link your site to other relevant and safe information.  The more active your site, the more likely the search engines will find it.  And that translates into more visitors and more customers for you.

Tags: Blog Entries, SEO content, Website Content