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The Importance of Local Search


Seventy four percent of people look online first for information about local businesses. Find out what this means and how VT Web Properties can help put your business in front of people already looking for your service or product.

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What is SEO?


What is SEO, anyway?

Often times I find that my clients have heard of SEO or SEM, but have at best a limited understanding of what search engine optimization actually is. I hope to provide some insight into this with this first post on the subject.

Search Engine Optimization or SEO is the process of designing and developing websites and website content with search engine ranking in mind. The reason SEO is an important component in any successful web development project is because the value it adds in the long term through increased exposure of the site or page in question via search engine results (SERPS).

For most websites traffic is brought to the site via search engines. When a person goes to Google, Yahoo!, MSN or another search engine and sends a query they are hoping to have the search engine return the most relevant results for the keywords they have entered. The job of search engines is to deliver the most relevant results possible for any given query.

Imagine, for example, that you were interested in taking a ski vacation in Vermont. You might use the keywords "ski vacation Vermont" to ask a search engine for pages related to planning your vacation in Vermont. The job of SEO is to craft webpages that target these keywords in the content and to become what is considered to be an authority on the subject of Vermont ski vacations. How is this done?

There are two aspects to SEO work - on-site and off-site. On-site factors include the proper use of META data, keyword placement, image naming, proper tagging and other tools to best signify to search engine spiders that your page has valuable information relating to the keywords you are targeting. Off-site work includes building inbound links to the page so that search engines begin to count the inbound links as "votes" from other sites that your page has important or valuable information relating to Vermont ski vacations.

In subsequent posts I will discuss some of the methods available to gain these links, but in a nutshell SEO is the frontend process of building compelling content in a technically correct manner coupled with ongoing efforts to get the pages you have built recognized by search engines as valuable responses to targeted queries.

We'll take a look later at how best to decide what keywords to target.