SEO for Pleasanton businesses is not really as difficult as it might seem, at first glance. It is definitely essential, however, and can make a huge difference in the ranking of your business web site, despite the naysayers who claim that SEO, or search engine optimization, is obsolete and no longer affects anything.

While it is true that quality content is the key factor, if you provide content without including keywords to help visitors find you, you will reach fewer members of your target audience. One blogger tested this on a public bulletin board he was running. After beginning an SEO program, he saw immediate results, and after only a month, search engine traffic had increased to nearly double.

While key words – that is, single, individual words – used to be the focus of SEO, the changes in Google’s algorithms mean that it is now necessary to use long tail keywords (more accurately, key phrases) and predict user needs and keyword intent.

Today social media is a key point in an effective SEO strategy, because of this change. Even though Google states officially that social signals do not affect ranking, those who make use of them would disagree, based on results. Bing, on the other hand, stated that it DOES look at social signals for ranking its results. Promoting via social media such as Facebook, Google Plus, Twitter, and similar platforms may make a bigger impact than the search engines themselves want you to know.

One of the most important SEO factors is content that can be easily indexed by the search engines. Actual HTML code is best for this. Things like Flash, Java, images, and similar non-text elements cannot be read by search engines and therefore will not be indexed. Things that are not indexed cannot be searched. Using text will give the search engine something to focus on and index to serve to searchers. You can make images more SEO-friendly by putting a good description of them – and include keywords – in the “alt” text inside the image tag.

There are many sites that offer tools to view your website as search engines do, such as SEO-browser.com. This will show you the content that can be indexed. You can use the information you find there to improve your ranking by adding or changing what the search engine sees. This will allow visitors to more easily find your page when searching for your product or service.

While considering SEO, it is imperative to be sure that your pages are all linked together. Easy navigation that includes all pages – if necessary, a site map that includes links to all pages would aid in this – will allow search engines to find all of the content that you want to have available to searchers.

As you can see, SEO is not obsolete, even though the particulars have changed a little bit. SEO for Pleasanton businesses is just as important as ever, and knowing how to use it can definitely make a marked difference in your search engine ranking.