The Official Atomic Medium Blog

In this day and age it is obvious to even the smallest business that the internet is a broad medium of interaction between yourself and prospective customers. Yet with the hundred of millions of people who are online at any given moment you still have to be found by those people before they can be considered a customer (or even a possible one!). Everyone knows that when you want to find something on the internet you need to go to a search engine like Google, Ask, or Yahoo, but understanding how to make your site show up when someone is looking for your services is the hard part. This is where SEO comes in.

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is the concept of using tried, true methods to improve your standing (often referred to as Rank) on those popular search engines. The higher your rank, the more likely you are to show up for the search terms that you want to.

Of course, it is never that simple. While there are some general standards that go across every search engine (such as keywords and the amount of content you have) that can help your ranking, there are also some that only help you on certain search engines or that could help your ranking one month and the next not help it at all. Google, for example, has their own set of rules that they apply to the websites they list, and if you break the rules there can be consequences (lower rankings, not being listed for searches, and in the worst case scenario ‘black-listing’ of your pages!). While the search engines don’t just have all of their standards publicly released with all the specifics for everyone to follow exactly, SEO specialists take the time to figure out what works best on websites to get you to come on the first page for any given search. These methods are utilized in Search Engine Optimization to help get your website to search engines faster and closer to the first page.

The changing standards and endless competition between your website and your competitors makes the method to getting yourself ranked in search engines far from an exact science. Companies and SEO specialists out there that can help you with getting your website seen often have plenty of experience in experimenting with techniques that get websites ranked quickly and the knowledge to know how to keep them there for long periods of time, regardless of an influx of new competition the difficulty of getting a keyword ranked. However, there are some basic tips and tricks you can follow to get your website on the right track:

1. Use relevant keywords. Even though you want your company to show up when people search for “cell phones” does the term show up anywhere on any of your web pages? Picking keywords that also appear in your website lets a search engine know that your website actually contains something relevant.
   
2. The more (relevant) text the better. If your website has 3 lines of text on each page, your competitor with 4 lines will always look better to the search engines. The more (relevant!) content on a page, the better experience for your visitors and the more the search engines want to refer people to it.
   
3. And finally, always spell check. Bad spelling just looks bad, and the search engines know when you typo (and so will your visitors). Make sure you double check your spelling and grammar before posting something to the internet. A few mistakes here or there won’t hurt, but bad grammar through the whole website is bad for your ranking and your reputation to those possible customers.