It’s true. There are three little letters that, as a business owner, you NEED to know. Of course, this is for business owners that have a website, but if you are a business owner without one… then we need to have another conversation entirely.

The three little letters you need to know are SEO. What is SEO? Most people have heard of it, but are too embarrassed to actually admit they have no idea what it is. Don’t worry, you’re not alone. Most of our clients need a little run through on what SEO is and what it can mean for your website and your business.

SEO stands for search engine optimization. Still in the dark? OK, let’s say you have a website that is about marketing in San Diego. You would hope that when you type the words “marketing San Diego” into Google that your website will be among the top search results. If it’s not, then you need to optimize your website for the search engines in order for it to get on that coveted first page.

So how do you go about doing that exactly? Well the main thing is that you need to prove to Google that your site is relevant to your keywords. Obviously some keywords would be easy. Let’s use the company name Prova Advertising. If you typed into Google “Prova Advertising,” the top results will be about Prova.fm. This is as it should be. Go ahead and try this with your company name. If you’re not in the one or two slot, you have a lot of work to do.

The first keyword you need to “win” is your company name. The next set would be what people would search for in order to find your business. Let’s take Prova for example. I would want to win the phrase “Advertising Designs” That’s a pretty competitive keyword phrase, so it’s going to take some time and work to get to the top of the rankings. But it’s not impossible.

The first thing we need to do is go back to our website and review the following items:

1. Title tags. This is what you see at the top of your browser when you go to your website. Prova.fm has a title tag that says “Launch your own advertisement design contest.” Obviously Prova wants to “win” the keyword phrase “advertisement design contest.”  Take a look at your website. If yours just says the name of your company or worse says “Welcome,” you need help.
2. Keywords. Some people are going to argue and say that keywords aren’t that important anymore… and yes this is true. They aren’t THAT important anymore. However… they still are important and should not be ignored. Keywords go into the actual code of your site, so if you are not comfortable with working in html, you should get a professional to help you. These words can and should be properly researched. But don’t let any professional SEO company tell you they use an expensive piece of software to do this. The best tool, and it’s the tool my company uses, is Google’s free keyword tool. It’s very simple to use. If you’re at a loss for keywords, you can use this tool to search your site and see what it thinks your website is about. You may be surprised to see what it says.
3. Description. Again, this is something that you need to edit in the code of your site, so if you are not comfortable, let a professional help you. It may also be worth your time to get a professional writer to do this for you. It’s just a couple of sentences and shouldn’t cost much. The description is the copy that Google will use to describe the page it finds of your site. You’ve seen this copy before. You search for something, get your results, and then you read a brief description of what each result is. This copy comes from the code and is an opportunity for you to add keywords and selling copy to entice people to click on your website.

So once you’ve gotten a great website design from one of the talented website designers at Prova.fm, your website work isn’t done. Now, it’s time to focus on SEO. Focus on the first three items mentioned in this article and come back for part II to learn more about what you can do to increase your website traffic and gain more exposure for your business.

For more information on the sites listed in this article, you can visit prova.fm. For more resources on this topic you can visit our helpful blog at prova.fm/advertising/blog/

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