Wherever your website is located, in order to be seen in the search engines, you will have to put in quite a bit of effort. For example, if you type “SEO Dallas” into a search engine portal, but you live in Walnut Creek, the results you get will be specific to the Dallas area. However, if you simply type “SEO” into the search box without specifying the exact area, the results you get will be based on either your IP address or the location of your device.

Organic search results are not because of luck or chance. In order to show up in search engine results – especially if your keywords have a lot of competition – it takes planning, strategy, and a lot of work. If you don’t know what you are doing you could end up wasting much more time than you might believe.

Hiring an SEO Agency

The question is, “SEO or no SEO?” The answer is that it depends on what you want to happen with your website. If you want your site to be successful and get a lot of traffic, you are going to either have to implement your own SEO campaign, or you are going to have to hire an SEO professional to help you out.

Here are some of the most important facets of successful SEO:

• Keyword research
• Strategic design
• On-page SEO
• Off-page SEO
• Technical SEO

If you don’t understand any of these terms, you should seriously consider hiring a professional to get your SEO where it works best for your goals. Planning out your SEO strategy before you even build the site is the best way to go if you want to dominate the search results.

Keyword Research

Although it may seem like a simple little task to pick out a few keywords that work for what you are trying to promote online, there is a great big world out there full of people that have different perspectives about what you are promoting.

The way that you word things might be a lot different than the next person. For example, on the West Coast, everybody refers to their daily meal breaks as breakfast, lunch, and dinner. In the Mid West, the people refer to their meals as breakfast, dinner, and supper. Dinner has two different meanings for these people who both speak plain English and are in the same country.

Not that every word that you could think of is expressed differently in every state across the country, but the words that people actually use to do internet searches will vary here and there. The solution to this is to have access to a tool that allows you to type in keywords and find alternate key phrases that people actually search for.

If you have a website that sells shoes, you will have to research all of the variants of the search term and use the best ones to your advantage for every landing page of a product that you have.

For instance, you have:

• Shoes
• Men’s shoes
• Women’s shoes
• Kids shoes
• Shoes for children
• Shoes for work
• Boots
• Dress shoes

If you were to simply put the word “shoes” into a search box and see the results you would be presented with results that are from commerce giants such as Amazon, Nike, and other well-known shoe distributors.

Building a web presence based upon your keywords will be a slow and daunting process where you will learn to take advantage of keyword variants that are not so popular, but can help you build up to where your highly competitive keywords have a chance of showing your site in the search engine results.

Strategic Design

One of the most powerful ways to ensure a strong search engine presence is to not even build the website until after you have planned out the entire strategy. For example, if you choose a domain name with your top pillar keyword in it you will have an advantage over the ones that do not.

Some of the most important factors of search engine visibility depend on some tiny details that begin in the fabric of the goals of the website itself.

Some key elements to consider when planning SEO are:

• Pillar keywords
• Domain name
• Business name
• Target audience
• Service areas

A website is more than just a beautifully designed work of art that looks great to the visitors. Of course, it helps, but in reality, only a handful of visitors will be able to see the site if it does not appear in the search engines.

When you plan the site out before you build it you can consider the key factors that will help it be visible. Actions such as choosing a name for the business, including keywords in the domain, and mapping out the landing pages for services or goods all can contribute to the health of the website’s visibility.

On-Page SEO

When it comes to search engine optimization it is best if all of your ducks are in a straight row. One of the most prominent factors of successful SEO is to be able to beat the competitors that are fighting for the same keywords that you want to show up for.

If you and 12 other businesses are competing for the same keywords and there are only 10 spots on the first page of Google it means that you have to fight for your place up there. Out of all of your competitors, the ones with the most sound websites are going to win…even over the ones with the most thought-out keyword strategies.

Here are some of the most important factors regarding on-page SEO:

• Page URL
• Page title
• Page heading
• Page content
• Outbound links
• Inbound links
• Alt text

It is important to keep the flow of the pages and the content consistent with the keywords that you want to show up for. Each page will have its own keyword focus, in order to have the best results.

Off-Page SEO

Another pillar of the foundation of search engine visibility is the way that you present your website and the pages of your site on other sites. Of course, there are platforms such as business listings and social media, but there are a plethora of other options for SEO out there that the average person may not have access to.

• Search engines
• Business platforms
• Local websites
• Article listing websites

One of the things that an established SEO agency can provide is resources. Once a company has been in business for a while and has helped many other businesses rise to the top of the search engines they tend to gain a collection of valuable assets.

In addition to having the clients, the agency will have access to many websites that have great domain authority that allow articles to be posted. In case you didn’t already know it, articles posted on high-quality domains with backlinks to your website increase your own domain authority and help you to rank higher in overall search results.

Off-page SEO is a much more difficult portion of the search engine optimization formula because it takes a lot of outreach and networking to make it happen.

Trying to accomplish a robust off-page SEO campaign without the proper network is a huge task and virtually impossible for a person that does not have all of the connections for blog postings and business listings.

Technical SEO

In addition to the on-page SEO techniques that we described above, there are also many technical factors that come into the picture when it comes to search engine visibility. For starters, search engines do not like websites that take too long to load. Of course, it might not be a big deal if you have a site that has keywords that do not have much competition, but every little bit counts when it comes to being picked above other sites.

In addition to page load times, there are other factors that are embedded in the code of every site that the search engines look for when they are contemplating whether or not to load results. If the code that they are looking for to clarify the integrity of the site are not up to significant standards, the sites with the lower efficacy will be placed lower in the results.

True Facts

Whether or not a business chooses to hire an SEO agency to manage its online presence is completely up to the business. There is no law or rule that says people need to do SEO in order to be on the internet. However, the only way that websites show up in search results is if they are built to get there and they have qualities about them that stand above their competitors. That being said, if you want results the best way is to implement professional SEO tactics and make it happen.