Why does SEO matter?

Website names are pretty easy to remember. With the advent of social media, people can even find sites that their friends “share” without typing anything into the URL bar.

Most serious sites today are designed to be found on search engines in a process that is called “search engine optimization.” According to Evolution in DesignZ, an SEO-oriented website design firm, “The point of search engine optimization is to get your website ranked [on search engines] for specific keywords. These keywords should be the products or services you offer, or a topic of discussion on your website.”

So why do I need to optimize my site for search engines?

Numbers

Three quarters of the average website’s users found them on a search engine. Right now, Google has a near-monopoly on searches using most languages using the Latin alphabet, though Chinese has baidu and Cryllic has Yandex.

Getting your site highly ranked on Google can make your traffic explode without having to buy a single advertisement. It’s possible to do this yourself if you have a good PR team that can garner lots of comments and blog posts linking back to your site.

However, a better option for most companies is to hire an SEO firm. They can fix up your site (onsite SEO), build backlinks (offsite SEO), and in the process spread the word about you and your product in the blogosphere. That’s why when you hire a website design company, you should make sure they know how to design a site that’s both good for human readers and shows up highly on Google searches.

Reputation

Google ranks sites based on how many sites link back to them and how good those sites are. This is called their “PageRank”. Although it’s an often over-stated metric, it can give you a ballpark estimate of how valuable outgoing links from your site are, which you can then use to trade with other sites so that they show up higher on search engines.

Post by Murray Newlands, with help from Ronnie Chatterjee of Evolution in DesignZ.