What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?

Search Engine Optimization or SEO for short, is the process of deliberately optimizing a website or webpage with the aim of making it visible in a search engine’s “natural” or unpaid (“organic”) search results.

Back in the day, the belief, now proven to be a myth, was “if you build it, they will come”. This means all you had to do was build your website and the right kind of traffic will somehow automatically find its way to your site in truckloads. Like I said, this is now very well known to be a fairy tale, a bad one at that. The internet is quite like real life. If you put up a new company/business building in a neighbourhood or business district in your city and not put up any signage to let people know you’re there and what you do, it’ll be foolhardy to think you’ll have any customers at all.

In a previous article I compared search engines to yellow pages. People used them to look up businesses offering goods or services they needed. These days, search engines carry out that function, even in not first world countries like Nigeria which do not have the most impressive internet penetration rate at the moment. People get on search engines every day to find painters, schools, computer sales or repair people, website designers, you name it.

If you’re wondering why your website doesn’t come up in the natural search results, you might want to take a closer a look at your SEO, if at all you even put that into consideration when designing your website, because no matter how fantastically built your website is, if it is not optimized to be found and properly indexed by search engines for your particular key words and key phrases, your website may remain buried deep in the search results and never receive any free traffic.

SEO takes quite a bit of work but is richly rewarding with long lasting free traffic coming from natural search results. It involves properly and cleverly inserting your desired key words and key search phrases into you website’s content as well as its meta data (your website designer should know what that means). There a number of other tasks and aspects to SEO and we hope to touch on them in future pieces.

If you’re unsure whether or not your website has been optimized for search engines, you might want to have a chat with your website designer or contact us to help with turbo-charging your website’s performance on the search engines. From inception all our websites have been built in keeping with the prevailing Search Engine Optimization standards.