To be successful advertising your business on the internet, everything starts with an appealing, effective, and “search engine friendly” website. Lacking these three elements, it’s going to be almost impossible for everyone to find you and your business online.

Of all three factors though, the most important so that you can improve your business online is to make your website “SE friendly” – and that all begins with search engine optimization or “SEO” for short.

New to SEO? In fact, most of us have no idea how search engines like Google determine exactly which websites rank at the top and which are completely ignored. So if you’re not familiar with how it all works, it’s not just you!

In short, search engine optimization or SEO is the art and science of getting your website as quick to find by the search engines as possible. So when you’re making it easy for the SE to find you…then your potential customers can find you as well.

SEO is arguably THE most important factor when it comes to setting up a profitable and successful online presence because without this, it doesn’t matter how cool your site or how earth-shatteringly incredible your product or service is, if no one can find you in Google, then it’s all for nothing.

Just How Does SEO Really Work?

Well lets say you’re a dentist in San Mateo, California and you would like to grow your business. As a dentist, potential clients looking for the services you provide may type in such terms as “san francisco dentist” or other such words into major search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing.

In a perfect world, your website would appear on the first place ranking in Google for both of those “keywords” that your potential customer has keyed in. If your website shows up on the first page of the Google, then your potential clients will be very likely to find you and find out about your dental services:

However, if your business website isn’t showing up on the first page of search engine results, then potential clients are looking elsewhere for their dental services. Consequently, they’re going to have a really hard time finding your site and learning about what you do. The fact is, the last time YOU did some research on Google for anything, when did you ever go to the second page of search engine results? If you’re like many individuals, probably very infrequently, if at all.

The objective then, is to get your website to the first page of Google. That is where all the traffic and money is because so few people search deeper than page one.

Also the higher your business website shows up on page one the better. In addition, it’s been shown that for people that are in search of local business services online, 61% of them make a buying decision on that search!

Now more than ever before, it’s vitally important for businesses to have excellent exposure on the search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo.

The major search engines, including Google examine both factors to determine what website they’ll “serve up” when someone enters a keyword like “san francisco dentist,” “toothache,” “beanie baby” or “how to lose weight.” Each time a person enters any of these keywords into the search box, the search engine (and Google is the best at this right now) combs the internet in a millionth of a second to serve up the webpage or website they deem is most relevant and authoritative for your search. This shows how you get to the top of the rankings.

When you combine “relevance” with “authority,” you have a magical formula for success with having your website and your own individual webpages to the first page of Google and the other search engines.

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Article by Ralph C Burns. To get information on affordable seo for small business, check out our website, the Antares website.