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| Google is a search engine! |
What is a Search Engine and Why Should I Care?
IX Brand SEO Services Company is a small business search engine optimization consultant with an office in Sugar Land, TX, but we work with clients from around the Metro Houston area, around Texas and across the US. Call 281-343-3284 for more information.
When I start to talk about search engine optimization with small business owners, I often lose contact with my audience. Most business owners don’t really know what a search engine is and they don’t understand how a search engine might affect their businesses. Let me try to explain.
Google is a search engine. When you type a few words into the Google search box, you’re using a search engine to find information on the Internet. Yahoo and Bing are also search engines and the three of them are the search engines most people use to find information on the Web. This includes information about small businesses — locations, customer reviews, product and service information and so on. If you use a smart phone to search the Web, you’re also using a search engine to find your information. So search engines are the web-based tools that people use to find information, including local business information, on the Internet.
It’s important to have at least a vague idea of how search engines work to display relevant information in response to your search. Basically, the search engines use a huge network of computers to fetch web pages from all over the World. I’ll describe how Google works and the others work in similar ways. The program that does this fetching is called Googlebot and this process is called crawling the websites. Once each web page is retrieved, it’s indexed so that Google knows what words are on the page and their positions on the page. Google cannot index photos and videos and some other files so it relies on tags associated with media files to determine their content.
When someone searches Google, the Google computers use this massive index of web page content to find the most relevant web pages for that search. Google uses over 200 factors to determine how important and authoritative each web page is and one of those factors is the number of quality inbound links pointing to that page. So building quality links to your website is a very important part of search engine optimization. When Google decides that your website is the most authoritative with the most relevant information for the search, it’s displayed at the top of the results list. This is the spot you want your business to occupy in search results.
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| Google Search Results for “hubcap rim dodge 2007 3500” |
So as a business owner, you should understand that if there’s very little text on your website, then there will be very little for the search engines to use in deciding if your site is relevant to any searches and you won’t rank well in search results. If you have mostly pictures on your website, you won’t do well in search results because the search engines can’t “see” image files. Also, if you have a new website with few links to it, you also won’t do well in search results.
IX Brand SEO Services can help you build the text content on your website, optimized for the keyword phrases that your customers use to find your products or services. I can also help you build new, quality links to your website to improve your search engine rankings. Give me a call at 281-343-3284 to talk about your website and discuss ideas for improving your business search rankings. My goal is increase your Internet-driven customer traffic every month.
Related articles
- Great Content is the Foundation of SEO – Search Engine Optimization – Wharton TX (houstontexasseo.com)
- What is a search engine and how important are they? (marketing.yell.com)
- Can Too Much SEO Be a Bad Thing? (entrepreneur.com)
