I’ll bet it’s been a long time since you opened up a phone book. If your furnace blows the first cold night of the year, who do you turn to? Your computer of course. You Google “furnace repair,” find the company that suits you and ring them up. You do this because it is a fast and simple way to get the job done.
Thanks to the internet there are now billions of pieces of information floating around cyberspace. Everything we could hope to know is on the internet somewhere. In the middle of the night when the furnace goes out we don’t aimlessly wander through websites hoping to find what we need. We use search engines to help us find what we need quickly, and easily. We type in a simple phrase and up pops pages of results, all listed neatly. Usually what we want is right there on the first page of results. We click the link, and are taken to a website. The phone number of the closest furnace repair guy is right there. A quick phone call later and help is on the way.
As quick as that we can solve our problems on the internet. Everything we need is in one place and easy to locate. Search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing filter through zillions of pages at lightning speed to give us relevant results. We don’t know how the engines do that and the vast majority of us don’t care.
For those who do care, how does this happen? How do the search engines figure out which sites to list first? Everyone does know the sites appearing at the top of the list are the ones that will get the most clicks. The fact is how the search engine locates a site depends greatly on how the site is created.
The highest ranking websites in the search results are due to the fact they were designed to be optimized for the search engines. Search engine optimization improves the visibility of a site and allows it to rank higher in its search results. This is a terrific marketing strategy for any business. The webmaster responsible for designing a website thinks through a variety of factors.
He thinks about the way in which search engines operate and what the target audience is looking for. He will then consider the actual terms that the searcher typed into Google. Our chilly friend in search of furnace repair probably entered something like “furnace repair in Poughkeepsie” considering he was cold in Poughkeepsie. These words are known as “keywords” and are found in the content of the website. The search engine seeks out such words on the internet, finds these very words and returns the appropriate websites to the top of the search results.
This is pure magic for businesses. They can design websites to be loved by the search engines and the consumer will find them. Website designs, menus, images and content can all be optimized for search engines. Search engine optimization comes to the aid of consumers as well. Because search engines seek out specific keywords, they are far less likely to come up with false search results. They won’t return a site of an air conditioner repairperson in Los Angeles for our chilly guy in Poughkeepsie for instance.
Search engines have made it easier than ever before to find information. We can spend minutes researching a topic instead of hours sifting through encyclopedias. We can search for a business and have a phone number faster than we could find and open our phone book. Thanks to Search Engine Optimization we get the results we need quickly.
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