In the mid-19th Century, Samuel Colt’s revolving cylinder pistol was called the ‘Great Equalizer’ because it was relatively easy to use and affordable to the average person – it allowed the common man headed west to be able to defend himself. These days, there’s another great equalizer for people trying to make their way in a highly competitive business environment – search engine optimization, or SEO.
SEO Basics – What is SEO Marketing and Basic SEO Techniques
SEO Marketing, in a nutshell, is an approach to designing your web content that is designed to improve your ranking on the web browsers. Solid SEO strategies will deal with both the static web copy on your actual website and other content used for marketing – articles, SEO blogs, etc.
Basic on page SEO strategy involves using SEO keywords that people searching for your services or products type into their web browsers in a way that the search engines recognize favorably. This gives you a better chance of being on the front page of a potential customer’s search results.
There’s more to it than that, of course. There are also off page SEO strategies. It’s also important that whoever is optimizing your website use organic search engine optimization techniques, resulting in web pages that are optimized and will be found, but that also have something worth reading.
Avoiding the Black Hats – and Grey Hats, for that Matter
Unfortunately, there are plenty of Los Angeles SEO services who claim to offer cutting edge ways of making your page rank. Many of them practice what’s called ‘black hat’ optimization – basically an SEO keyword strategy that involves stuffing your web pages with keywords to the point that they make little or no sense to a reader.
Once upon a time, black hat SEO could get your page to rank well. Of course, nobody who goes to a website filled with gibberish is going to buy from the company running the site. So, even back then, black hat was not an effective online marketing strategy. It just wasn’t.
These days, it doesn’t even help you rank well on the search engines – it just isn’t an effective SEO strategy at all, on any level. This is because Google and the other search engines got wise to it and changed their algorithms to favor sites that have the key words and phrases used organically. It’s no longer enough to stuff keywords onto a web page. Today’s SEO strategies have to include placing those key phrases in the right places so that the search engines will recognize that the web page is likely to have the information the web user is looking for.
Who Has the Right SEO Strategies for Today
SEO best practices change fairly regularly to keep up with changes to the algorithms used by the major search engines. Because of this, many businesses outsource their SEO services. It’s simply more economical for most companies than hiring an SEO expert and then investing in them to make sure that they’re able to stay on top of current SEO trends.
That said, SEO is still a great equalizer, because it offers even small companies to compete on a relatively equal footing with larger companies – as long as you have the right people handling your SEO consulting.
So, who should you look to for SEO tips? Who really stays up to date with the SEO basics and more advanced SEO strategies? Consider this – when you were looking online for SEO companies Los Angeles, this is the blog you found. That should tell you something.