What is SEO and why is it important?
Submitted by Paul on Wed, 04/21/2010 - 09:57
You have a website that you are very proud of. It is very esthetically pleasing to the people visiting and everyone you show it to are impressed. But why isn't it showing up well in the search results of search engines such as Google, Yahoo or Bing?
The answer lies in that although it may be very intuitive and appealing to the human eye, it may be very confusing to search engines. Search engines routinely crawl the internet indexing web sites. They use software programs to read the text in the web pages to determine what is on those pages and how web sites are structured. Although these crawlers (or spiders) are quite sophisticated, they are still programs that have limitations. For example, they cannot read text that is part of images (although I hear they're working on that). The first step in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is to make your site as easy as possible for the crawler to read.
Why is this important? According to comScore, a leader in providing digital marketing intelligence, in July 2009, there were 25,095,000,000 searches performed in North America alone! If we use the usual 1/10 rule of thumb, that gives 2.5 billion searches in Canada alone. And that's in only one month! People are using the internet search engines to find what they are looking for. Ranking on the first pages in the search results can drive many visitors to your site who otherwise would not have known about it.
