Let’s consider a baby who is clean, who has been fed and who gets lots of attention. Despite all the efforts by his parents, he just keeps crying to get what he wants; which is to put everything in his mouth and to have your undivided attention 24/7. Your mother-in-law might say “You can’t just let the baby cry! Pick him up”.

How productive would our work day be if we responded to every marketing message we encountered the same way we respond to baby?

Today, consumers are more in control of the messages they receive with internet search. Consumers tend to pay less attention to advertisements and spend more time searching the internet for what they want, when they want it. This is why SEO or Search Engine Optimization is so important.

Start With A Few Important Words

Babies start with a few important words to tell their parents what they want. Do the same for your website and identify a few important keywords and keyword phrases that best describe what you have to offer.

Searchers decide what word or phrase best captures what they are looking for and they search for it using a search engine such as Google or Bing. On the results page, there will be some links to websites at the top and to the side which are the paid ads. Just underneath are the organic results. This is where SEO counts and where most people look for relevant web pages.

Search engines use software that scans the internet for webpages, keywords and hyperlinks. These crawlers or bots use complex algorithms to index your website according to how relevant the information is for a given keyword search. This software is designed to predict how a real person might search.

You May Understand What Baby Is Saying, But Others May Not

On the results page, searchers will find relevant web pages displayed with a title and a description. These are the most important items to a web searcher because it is what they quickly scan through to see if it is worth clicking further. The title and description must be relevant and make sense or else no one will click on it.

In a Google search, the title is what appears in blue underline with the keywords queried showing in bold. This is the same title that is displayed at the top of your browser’s window or tab. Just underneath this is the meta description. It should give a concise description of the contents of the web page in 25-30 words. If it is a homepage of a website it should describe what is on the entire website.

It is very important to write content for your website that is coherent and sounds natural to the reader. Make sure to include your keywords within the context of your webpage content as well as in your title and description. Break your information into sections and use headers to describe each section. These headers should also include keywords.