Spreading the word about your small business is often one of the greatest challenges. Some business naturally (organically is the new term) attract business because of a number of reasons which may include high visibility, a product or service in high demand, a large number of existing customers who are apt to refer their friends, or a continuing short list of reasons. Most businesses, however, do not enjoy these luxuries and are also lacking in a budget for mass advertising.
Anyone who has started a business has either thought of having a website, already has a website or has been approached by a professional (or hobbyist) web developer/master to get their business online or to improve their online presence. Generally and historically speaking this conversation will be about how the website looks and performs and not so much about what it contains. The content is generally left to the business owner to create and manage. Content can be wrong, bad and damaging.
How Do Search Engine's Work?
All major search engines have massive data centers with automated programs, called robots or search bots, which scan the web 24/7 creating a database of every word, photo, sound, or download, on the Internet. Since they are automated the robot needs a form of intelligence to decide how to categorize the information so that the search client is presented with the best possible results. There are thousands of factors which help these search bots pick the appropriate search results and they are based on "algorithms" constantly maintained by the search engine companies.
Algorithms give scores to websites based on content, geographic location, trust level of inbound links, number of mentions in social media, age of content, length of domain registration both historical and into the future, and many other factors. No one knows all of the factors or how much weight they have in determining where your site shows up in search results. We do know, however, the more frequent, unique and relevant your content is and the more engagement your site gets the better you are going to score.
What Is SEO?
The practice of search engine optimization, though an ever changing landscape, is making sure certain criteria, usually based on the Google algorithms, are met. Proper spelling, valid content, relevant information, good Geographic pinpointing, and other factors are considered. The practitioner, "seo expert", must maintain knowledge of constantly changing practices on all major search engines.
Search engine optimization is part art, part science and part anticipation. It is very easy to be mislead by so-called search engine optimization companies because most small business owners and entrepreneurs really do not know much about how it works so almost anything technical sounding with a few statistics sounds like it should work.
If the small business owner or entrepreneur already has a web presence one of the best things to do at least once per year is perform an SEO evaluation on their website(s). This provides a depth of knowledge about not only their website but also peeks at their competition and provides some insight and guidelines on how to improve.
Is There "Bad" SEO?
Blackhat techniques are what bad SEO practices are called. Many so-called SEO experts offer these techniques because they do, at least temporarily, improve search engine ranking. There is a long term danger in using these techniques that Google and other search engines may blacklist your site(s) and it can be so bad they never let you in the search engine again.
Bad SEO techniques include things like "keyword stuffing" where an SEO expert will create articles filled with words they believe the search engine will like, purchased backlinks also known as link farms, off-topic comment marketing where they will visit blogs and websites and throw comments in with links back to your site, and other similar methods. Just don't do this no matter how appealing it seems. It is not worth being blacklisted forever.
If you have any questions about search engine optimization and what it means to your business, how you can accomplish better search rankings or any other relevant topic feel free to ask here in the comments, on Twitter or on Google plus.