What Is SEO and Why Does My Website Need It?

So you wonder, what is SEO? You may have already heard of SEO or Search Engine Optimization, but you are not quite sure what it is or why you need it. The truth is that there are few things that are more important to you site than having a high ranking in search engines, but you are likely to get different answers from different people concerning how to achieve this. In order to answer your question in the most comprehensive and accurate way, we took a closer look at Google's guidelines on its webmaster tools site and took a look under the hood of SEO.

SEO has gotten a bad name in recent years because of a handful of individuals who used "black hat" practices to exploit search engines instead of work with them. Choosing the wrong SEO professional caused many websites to suffer damage to their reputation and they found themselves buried in search engine rankings once Google updated their algorithms. However, SEO professionals who are honestly interested in improving and promoting their client's pages can provide many benefits to your website.

Quality SEO professionals can:

• Review your site content for quality and structure
• Repair bad meta data that is hurting your rankings
• Develop new content that meets the quality standards that will improve search results
• Research keywords that are accurate to your product and get solid traffic
• Manage an online development plan that will make your site a destination for your target demographic

The best time to hire an SEO professional is when you are just beginning a new web design or when you are considering a considerable website overhaul. In many ways, an SEO professional will have to significantly renovate your website and you may not recognize it when it is done. You want your website to be friendly to the search engines from the bottom up.

Best practices matter

It is essential that your SEO professional follow the best practices guidelines that Google and other search engines insist upon. In that spirit, there are some things that any SEO should be willing to share up front:

• Success stories: They should be willing to share what they did for other sites and what the results were
• Knowledge of guidelines: They should know Google's Webmaster Guidelines chapter and verse
• Online Marketing Services: How do they organically compliment the content you already have?

Those that follow best practices will have specifics to offer. They will let you know realistic results you should expect in a specified time frame and be transparent about the methods that they will use to get you there. Choosing the right person or company to represent your search engine optimization interests can be a great boon to your business, but choosing poorly can lead to your downfall. If you have looked into it and cannot find a suitable SEO professional, it may be more beneficial to your business to do it yourself.

If you are looking for quality SEO tools and a free website builder that will allow you to create your website yourself, visit www.site123.com for more information on how to create a website that utilizes SEO best practices.

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