Calgary SEO Companies
May 29, 2015
For us and the majority of people in the world, our lives revolve around SEO and Calgary SEO companies, whether we realize it or not. From a Google search to find the cheapest price, to a Bing enquiry for the diagnosis of medical symptoms, we rely on the internet to give us the right answer, and give it to us NOW! The internet is used as an authority on all things and has become the resource we turn to first.
When it comes to marketing your small to medium business you need to understand the basics of SEO, how it works for your company, how it is used by your chosen demographic and why you need to employ certain strategies when adding any marketing to your portfolio.
What is SEO?
SEO is a term used for
Search Engine Optimization and it does what it says on the can! Search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo use keywords to select out the web pages that best meet your search criteria. Keywords are typed in by you and tend to be right at the heart of the information you are looking for. Search engines take the keywords and compare them to the information on the relevant web pages and pull up the sites most relevant, ranking them in the order they feel is most important to you.
If we lived in a world without marketers, then search engines would be neutral and able to pick from an even playing field, but as we don’t, a practice called search engine optimization comes in to play. For accurate SEO a
marketing company will take the metrics that are produced by the search engine company and select out the keywords that get searched most often, and make sure that their web pages are at the top of the search results. If you want to be in with a chance of being considered for a sale, then you need to make sure your SEO
web copy is up to scratch. If you want to grow your business, your SEO needs to be at the top of its game.
How much SEO do I need?
Many of the requirements for getting to the top of a keyword search on any search engine is kept a secret by the search engine companies. No search engine company wants to hand the answers to the final test out to class before they sit the test, and it’s the same on the internet. We know very little about the search criteria for SEO otherwise there would be no point for SEO, and what we do know comes from brainstorming and experience.
What we do know is that your keywords have to be relevant to your search, appear in body of the text and in the meta data. Making sure all your images have SEO titles, as well as your
social media posts, are all definite ways that give you the Calgary SEO companies advantage. There are many other things to consider like long tail keywords, amount of content, permalinks, site structure and lots more ‘behind the scenes’ elements that rank your content in a keyword search. Getting on the front page is one thing, staying there is quite another.
How do I keep my SEO rankings up?
If you have millions to invest in full time SEO managers, social media managers and constant monitoring of the metrics, staying at the top is not difficult. If you don’t have millions of dollars, you need to consider your strategy very carefully.
Maintaining a good SEO is a full time job. You need to work out which keywords you are going to target, and how you are going to work them on a daily basis or you will not succeed. They only way to get to the front page is to consistently use the keywords in every online communication, and regularly. If you don’t have the time to ‘wage’ a war on your search engine rankings you need to consider hiring a specialist from one of the many Calgary SEO companies in the city. A social media manager is real job and deserves a real wage, as they are the ones that will give your company visibility in online marketing. If you don’t know how to work the system, you’ll never be able to master it.
What is a ‘good’ SEO ranking?
Being number one in an
SEO ranking is the nirvana of all rankings, but it doesn’t come easy. Search engines are constantly monitoring the situation, and they constantly change the criteria, so your ranking will fluctuate and you need to keep on top of it.
Staying in the top 4 is where you want to be if you can’t get to number one, but after five your visibility drops considerably. After #10 you become completely invisible as you are on the next page. Don’t believe me – ask yourself this: When did you last go to page two of a Google search to find
anything?
Pick 20 keywords you want to rank highly in, not forgetting long tail keywords, and work on those. Employ them naturally and don’t force them in to your copy, but don’t forget them all together. They have to be included as often as possible, but if your copy is disjointed because of them it will be unreadable to the human users. You have to strike the delicate balance between the need to be seen with the need to be read.
If you have limited time, pick less keywords to work on. When you get to the top with one, start on another. Don’t forget to keep using
all the keywords you are working on, or have been working on, as the one thing we do know about SEO is that is usually calculated as a percentage. As you increase the content on your site (and you need to, it helps your SEO) the bots that do the searches will calculate how any times the keywords appear on your
whole site and look at it
as a percentage. The more content you add that is
not keyword friendly, the lower your density (percentage) is and, therefore, the lower you rank in a keyword search.
What is so special about Calgary SEO companies?
The one thing about keywords is that they have to be specific. They need to be specific to your industry and specific to your location. When sifting through the keywords to select you need to identify local terms and names to target so that you can garner local sales. Even if you are an internet only site you need to consider ranking high in a local search to increase your visibility. People need to know you are there, and using a local company, like
MeDM.ca, will get you noticed. Calgary SEO companies have the expertise and the experience that you can lean on.
In a graphic made by Rand Kishkin, he sums up the whole SEO goal in one graph:
Original article here: http://bit.ly/1OjPYC8
You can see how important ALL of your page and web design is to your SEO rankings – and how much you have to change to make it worth. Is it frustrating – yes, but also very much worth it.
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