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Search Engine Optimisation 101: Getting Found in Google

Customers are more likely to find you if they use Google. In fact, according to ComScore, Americans conducted over 13.1 billion searches in January 2013 alone. It’s incredibly probable that many of those billions of queries were connected to your product and service. To put it another way, if your website isn’t showing up in Google, you’re missing out on valuable customers who don’t know how to find your business. 

When you do a Google search, the results that appear on the SERP are known as organic, natural or sponsored results. On most sites, sponsored links, also known as advertisements, will usually show on the right side of the page and sometimes at the top.

Pay per click advertising, also known as sponsored links, are advertisements that a business pays Google to show its ads when consumers search for specific terms on Google. They pay according to how frequently searchers click on their ad and visit their website. You pay Google to send customers to your website with a paid search.

The opposite of sponsored results is organic outcomes. You are not paying Google to send people to your website with natural results. These results are based on the quality of your content and how valuable Google judges your sites to be for end users. If at all possible, try to get your visitors via organic results rather than sponsored ones.

The bottom line is that you want to get free traffic to your website, not pay for it. That’s what SEO is all about. When a person searches for keywords related to your business, you wish to improve the likelihood that your web pages show at the top of Google’s page. The Google first page contains the top ten results. You want to be on the first page of Google – end of discussion. According to recent studies, the first page of Google captures more than 89% of all search traffic, and most users will not venture beyond it. If you’re not on the top page, you’ll have a hard time getting discovered.

Here are three simple SEO ideas to help you get your site discovered:

1. Content, content, content– Your website must contain useful material that accurately reflects the intent of the user’s query.

2. Optimise your page titles– Put the most relevant keywords for your page in the title. The terms that appear earliest in a webpage’s title have greater weight than those that appear later in the document.

3. Use natural link creation – Link building is all about enticing other websites to link to your site. Don’t push them; Google’s algorithms will notice this. Instead, do it by guest-posting on interesting blogs and having a high-traffic blog. How can you have a high-traffic blog? Check out #1!

SEO (search engine optimization) is a powerful marketing tool that can be used as part of an inbound marketing strategy. Contact info@stardigital.com.au if you want to learn more about the inbound marketing concept and if you have questions regarding how SEO may benefit your firm.

Star Digital Marketing is a Des Moines-based marketing company that specialises in Inbound Marketing, Commercial Printing, Graphic Design, Social Media Management, Website Development and SEO.