Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization is a series of techniques and practices used in order to provide your website a Natural or Organic search result and ranking. Natural or Organic search results are crucial and essential if you want your site found in search results. SEO will help you position your website properly and get it found during critical points in your customers buying process or when people need your product or service.

Most Exposure has many years of SEO experience. We can optimize your website in a way that will make both your visitors/customers, as well as Google and other search engines happy? Most importantly, the SEO we provide can help your web presence become more profitable.

Think of the following analogy:

“Skipping the basics and spending all your time and money on social and ‘fancy stuff’ is the same as skipping brushing your teeth and showering, but buying white strips and wearing expensive cologne,”

What is SEO, Exactly?

The goal of fundamental SEO isn’t to cheat or trick the search engines. The purpose of SEO is to:

Create a great, seamless user experience.
Communicate to the search engines your intentions so they can recommend your website for relevant searches.

1. Your Website is Like a Cake

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Your backlinks, paid search, and social media acts as the icing, but your unique content, site information architecture, content management, and infrastructure act as the sugar and makes the cake. Without it, your cake is tasteless, boring, and gets thrown in the trash.

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2. What Search Engines Are Looking For

How do Search Engine determine if your website is relevant enough to rank it?

Content: Is determined by the theme or general ideas that are being presented, as well as the text on the page, and the titles and descriptions inside the site.
Performance: How fast does your site take to load and do all the internal links work correctly?
Authority: Does your site have powerful unique content to link to or do other authoritative sites use your website as a reference or cite the information that’s is on your site?
User Experience: How does the site look? Is it easy to navigate around? Does it look safe? Does it have a high bounce rate?

3. What Search Engines Are NOT Looking For

Search engine spiders are very good today at determining shady tactics or trying to trick them to rank. Not to long a ago, if you employed shady tactics the search engines would ignore you and not count your work. With the recent updates, Google will not give your website a penalty for trying to over-optimize your website. Some of the items the search engines don’t want are:

Keyword Stuffing: Overuse of keywords on your pages.
Duplicate Content: Information that has been copied from another website.
Purchased Links: Buying links will get you nowhere when it comes to SEO, so be warned.
Poor User Experience: Make it easy for the user to get around. Too many ads and making it too difficult for people to find content they’re looking for will only increase your bounce rate. If you know your bounce rate it will help determine other information about your site. For example, if it’s 80 percent or higher and you have content on your website, chances are something is wrong.

4. Know Your Business Model

While this may seem obvious, so many people tend to not sit down and just focus on what their main goals are. Some questions you need to ask yourself are:

What defines a conversion for you?
Are you selling eyeballs (impressions) or what people click on?
What are your goals?
Do you know your assets and liabilities?

5. Be Consistent With Domain Names

Domain naming is so important to your overall foundation, so as a best practice you’re better off using sub-directory root domains (example.com/awesome) versus sub-domains (awesome.example.com). Some other best practices with domain names are:

Consistent Domains: If you type in www.example.com, but then your type in just example.com and the “www” does not redirect to www.example.com, that means the search engines are seeing two different sites. This isn’t effective for your overall SEO efforts as it will dilute your inbound links, as external sites will be linking to www.example.com and example.com.
Keep it Old School: Old domains are better than new ones, but if you’re buying an old domain, make sure that the previous owner didn’t do anything shady to cause the domain to get penalized.
Keywords in URL: By having keywords in your URL that you’re trying to rank for will only help your overall efforts.

6. Optimizing for Different Types of Results

In addition to optimizing for the desktop experience, make sure to focus on mobile and tablet optimization as well as other media.

Create rich media content like video, as it’s easier to get a video to rank on the first page than it is to get a plain text page to rank.
Optimize your non-text content so search engines can see it. If your site uses Flash or PDFs, Most Exposure is always sure to read up on the latest best practices so search engines can crawl that content and give your site credit for it’s efforts.

7. Focus on Your Meta Data Too

Your content on your site should have title tags and meta descriptions.

Meta keywords are pretty much ignored by search engines nowadays, but if you still use them, make sure it talks specifically to that page and that it is also formatted correctly.
Your meta description should be unique and also speak to that specific page. Duplicate meta descriptions from page to page will not get you anywhere.

Title tags should also be unique! Think of your title as a 4-8 word ad, so do your best to entice the reader so they want to click and read more.

Summary: SEO is constantly evolving and changing to create a better user experience. There are many on-site and off-site strategies that would make this far too complicated for the average beginner to understand. We would be please to explain in more details the specific work your individual site would require in this process.