Search Engine Optimization - SEO

   Search Engine Optimization is a complicated process that raises your website’s ranking in search engine results. By following a search engine’s rules, or algorithms, your website gets top billing in categories that you want to be listed for. This becomes extremely important when you take into account the number of people who are abandoning traditional directories such as phone books in favor of internet searches which yield quicker results and more detailed information about a company. Think of an internet search that you’ve done in the past week. How did you find what you were looking for? How many pages of search results did you have to go through to find it? If you’re like most people, you typed in very detailed information so that you could find the website that is most relevant to what you’re looking for, and you found it right on the first page of the search results. Let’s take a look at how those results got there, and how making your business front page news is one of the fastest growing and most cost effective ways to advertise.

   In order to see how your business can benefit from Search Engine Optimization and Social Media Marketing, you have to understand how your customers find what they need online. Let’s say, for example, that you were looking for a pizza place in Stewartstown, PA that also served pasta and had free local delivery. You would probably type “Pizza, Pasta, Free Delivery, Stewartstown, PA”. Your first page of results would be websites that have been optimized to most closely match those specific terms, or “keywords”. Now imagine that the website for the best pizza/pasta restaurant in Stewartstown doesn’t rank for any of the specific words or phrases that people search for most. This will cause the site to appear low in the rankings and many people will never even see the website, let alone visit the restaurant. At YIPCS, we use one of the most effective keyword research tools available to help you find the words that will get you found.

   Link building is essential for higher search engine rankings as well. Having good links coming into your site from other pages show the search engines that you are a trusted member of the online community. A quality link is like a recommendation from another website, since they are, in effect, telling their visitors that your site contains good, useful information that will probably interest them. The key word in the last sentence is “quality” because many companies who provide link building services use links that are irrelevant to your product or service. If you are referred to a pizza place’s website by a website that sells Italian Sports Cars, you’re probably not going to buy a pizza, but if you are on a local farmers market website that mentions how that pizza place uses their fresh produce, the chances are good that your mouth is watering before you even get to the pizza site. YIPCS never uses junk links (that can actually hurt your site’s ranking over time).