AndPlus Mobile and Web Development

Worcester Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization is an art form, not an equation. Unfortunately, there are firms across the world promising #1 rankings. “Number one at making you number 1!” tends to be the claim to fame of these black-hat technique firms.  The fact is that there are billions and billions of dollars going into search engine technologies, and search engine corporations such as Google and Yahoo! employ some of the most intelligent software engineers in the world.

What makes *anyone* think that they can actually *outsmart* these engineers?

The answer is almost none of them can.  And those who do, are caught and these search engine corporations adapt to ensure they are not burnt in this way again.  This article is going to make some statements that may make you start thinking a bit differently about search engine optimization and Massachusetts SEO firms in general.  We’ll start slow.  Search Engine Optimization is not about driving traffic to your site.

Wait, what?

Search Engine Optimization is about optimizing your site underneath your website’s valuable content in order to give Search Engines such as Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and others the ability to read and understand your website in the most efficient means possible.  Added traffic is most certainly a result of a properly optimized website, but again, SEO work is not about driving traffic to your site!  If SEO was about driving traffic to your site, there are many cheap ways of tricking visitors into visiting your site.  Would 100,000 visitors a day really matter if none of them were qualified leads?

The internet, and even cities like Worcester, has become clouded with those claiming that they have 5 step processes and sure-fire ways of making your website come up first in search engines.  How do they do this? Ask them point blank the following questions before engaging any SEO firm:

• Why does my website need to be optimized? We create pretty good content already!
• What exactly will you be changing on my site?
• What link exchange programs are you planning on engaging?  Are they considered Black Hat?
• Will you be putting my corporate information into any directories such as DMOZ, or Yahoo! ?
• What measurable goals will be set in order to know if what you did work?
• Will the work that you are completing affect my site’s pagerank?
• Should I set up a Pay Per Click campaign?

Technical Talk

Optimizing your site is key, because there are particular elements on your website which are visually helpful to your reader, but cannot be leveraged in search engines.  The most obvious of these elements are images.  Google and Yahoo send out computer programs called Spiders which read through a web page and collect certain information about the page.  This does include images, but they should be considered to be blind.  Since these Spiders cannot see the image, they rely on an tag inside code called alt (external link explaining ‘alt’ tags).  So, you may have a graph that explains how rain trends downward in the summer months but upward in the winter months, contrary to a popular opinion.  The image will mean nothing to search engines, despite its immeasureable benefit to your readers, unless the alt tag is leveraged.

Conclusion

Hopefully this article was helpful to you in making your decision for search engine optimization work.  We encourage any Worcester corporation or small business to contact us today to see how we may be able to help.