Type “SEO practices” into your favorite search engine and you’ll quickly encounter a wide array of tactics that website developers use to improve website visibility in the search results of online search engines, such as Google or Bing. Despite the fact that many website owners ignore the need for optimizing their sites for high ranking by search engines, in an ever-growing landscape of websites for similar topics, this can mean an effectively invisibility website – no matter how sleek or useful it is.
Having your website listed near the top of search results is important for growing your business or brand, as studies have found that the first link in the list of search results gets more than 17% of all clicks, with a steady decline in clicks moving down the list. Just think, how often do you really click over to the 2nd or 3rd page of search results? Chances are, not often.
While some search engine optimization (SEO) strategies require advanced knowledge and skills, many of the more useful and flexible strategies are not only easier to understand, but tend to be more reliable over time. These practices, generally referred to as “organic” or “natural” SEO, are what we prefer to focus heavily on when developing websites at JV Innovations. They can take more time and effort to put into place, but their durable and consistent results make it worth the work.
Organic SEO is named such because the tactics it represents are built into the sites themselves and continue to grow and improve with the website over time, just like an organism would evolve and grow naturally. Due to the unpredictable nature of search engine algorithms, organic SEO methods rely on more stable search engine ranking criteria that are foundational and unchanging. This is because the organic SEO approach focuses mainly on strategic content and targeted web design to naturally drive traffic to your site based on relevant information, link building, and keyword matching.
Instead of paying search engines to put your website at the top of search results, why not invest those resources into building a website that will yield long-term and cumulative SEO results instead? The problem with simply purchasing a sponsored position at the top of search results is that once you stop paying the monthly fee, you effectively make your website invisible..
By incorporating organic SEO into your website’s structure and making it your prime marketing strategy, your site’s ranking will continue to remain high because your quality content and SEO-friendly web design will always be a part of your site. Moreover, many people tend to skip over those sponsored listings at the top of the search results, as they expect the first organic listing to be more relevant to their search. An ideal approach to improving your ranking in search results is actually a combination of using both sponsored positioning in search results (for a more immediate boost in ranking) while simultaneously incorporating organic SEO practices into your website (to create a more enduring effect on ranking).
The benefits of a content-oriented approach to SEO are twofold: your search engine ranking naturally improves while you effectively establish yourself and your website as a helpful and informative resource. Providing website visitors, and potential future clients or patients, with helpful (keyword-rich) information not only keeps them on your pages longer (helping to boost your ranking), but it also does the most important job for you: helps convert website visitors into actual clients or patients. Establishing yourself as an authority in your field through the vehicle of strong and useful content will serve your practice and your brand indefinitely.
The idea behind organic SEO is simple: the more you can do within your website to increase traffic to each page, the better your ranking will be. Providing well-written, keyword-rich content and building websites with appropriate tags and metadata are some of the ways we implement a successful organic SEO plan for our clients’ sites. Like most effective strategies, an effective organic SEO approach must be multifaceted. We work on organic SEO from all angles; outside of the websites we build (i.e. link building) and within the websites themselves (i.e. meta-tagging various elements).
We also focus heavily on clean, SEO-friendly web design. It’s important to consider how search engines are indexing each page of your website and to organize, label, and tag each page accordingly. When building a website, there are many areas where specific keywords can be included to boost the site’s ranking, and we prefer to use all of them. Details like design responsiveness and accessibility, as well as a website’s speed and functionality, all make an impact on how well the site ranks in search results. The more of these details that are addressed, the better the results.
After all, if you’re going to take the time to design a website worth visiting, why not make certain that it will be seen?
