Earning the Elusive Search Engine Rank

Let’s Talk SEO

Search Engine Optimization – A few months back, a friend of mine started an online cake and gift shop by the name of “C & G”. She had been handcrafting unique gifts and creating customized cakes on order for friends and relatives in her immediate circle. Encouraged by the good feedback, she decided to convert her talent into a full-time business. She got a website designed to promote her new business. She displayed all the products neatly with pricing and photographs, put down her contact information where it was easily visible, and registered it on Google. But even by the end of the six months, she saw no increase in traffic or number of orders per week.

She finally got her website analyzed by an expert who gave her the answer. The website had not been optimized for search engines. In other words, SEO was missing.

Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization or SEO is the process of optimizing website content in such a way that traffic is generated naturally and free of cost from search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing or through link building.

To understand SEO, one must understand how a web surfer’s mind works. Let’s suppose you are a customer looking for the best custom cake maker in Hyderabad. You go to Google and enter the relevant search string. A list of search results appears covering pages and pages of SERPs, better known as Search Engine Result Pages. Will you actually go through each and every search result page to decide which website you want to visit? Obviously not! You will quickly run through the first page of results and are more likely to click any of the first few links, starting with the topmost.

In such a scenario, do you think “C & G” would get any clicks if it was listed on the third or fourth pages? Perhaps, only one in 20 users would happen to find the website and visit it. And only one in perhaps 200 would actually place an order. For “C & G” to be able to connect to a larger chunk of the online audience, it must be ranked first on the search result page or at least on the first page of results.

There are various SEO strategies that “C & G” can use to achieve Rank #1. Let’s find out how!