In today’s fast paced internet universe, few businesses can retain their competitive edge without attention from search engines. 144 Billion people meander through the internet’s highways and byways daily, visiting 634 million websites. This has transformed today’s shop fronts into virtual ones made out of pixels rather than brick and mortar. Google’s annual growth in 2012 reached a climactic high of 1 billion monthly users in 2011, demonstrating its dominant position as the world’s favorite search engine.
Striking graphics, sterling penmanship and flawless interactivity certainly give businesses the upper hand, yet without search engine optimization that attracts the attention of Google’s bots, there can be no traffic and thus no profits. Google’s statisticians are constantly honing the algorithms that declare sites worthy or pointless, turning SEO into an ever evolving industry that must advance at a faster pace than Google itself. In the past, black hat SEO techniques gave webmasters a simple way to draw the masses to their sites. With the advent of more comprehensive algorithms such as Panda and Penguin, shallow content and repetitive copy were rendered moot. Search engines’ constant efforts to offer surfers unique and valuable search results has created a new niche for high standard SEO techniques that attract readers organically.
By offering keyword optimized content that gives readers genuine depth of information, an SEO expert is able to attract traffic that is more durable and loyal than that which was drawn by black hat strategies. Whilst most business owners consider SEO experts to be professionals responsible for drawing crowds towards a site, search engine optimization is capable of far more. Every business owner wants the ultimate rank at the top of Google’s search results, but if consumers are drawn to ineffective pages within the site, all strategy is rendered useless. One of the core goals of an SEO expert worth his salt is the ability to sculpt rank using a combined toolbox of nofollow and dofollow tags, deep links and prioritized pages.
By drawing traffic to sites that immediately convert clicks into actions, SEO tactics directly affect return on investment. Conversion has become a buzz word in the SEO industry for excellent reason. Consumers who click in and out of a site without interacting with it achieve little in terms of profitability. Sites that encourage targeted actions work on consumer behavior by raising interest, tempting clicks and converting actions into purchases.
In old fashioned language an SEO expert achieves the virtual equivalent of increasing visibility through the digital replacements for signage, advertising and location. Site performance, rank and reputation are all constructed by tactically controlling where traffic goes and how it behaves, and is intricately linked to your marketing and business model.
