Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for Walnut Creek businesses is an important consideration. While nearly everyone has heard that already, not everyone understands what it means, or why it is important. You can learn more about why SEO is necessary for business websites by continuing to read.

Why do you want your site optimized for search engines? The short answer is to draw traffic. Traffic refers to people who visit the site. Many of these people will find your site either through their friends and family, or through a search engine.

In order for visitors to find your site through a search, your site must be listed. Since most people never go beyond the front page of search results (usually the top ten or twenty results), and almost none go beyond the third or fourth page, you really want to be as close to the top of the list as possible. This ranking is achieved primarily through search engine optimization.

Search engines look for certain things when they visit a site to rank it. They look for content – good quality, useful, and preferably unique content. If your content is hidden or nonexistent, this will not be in your favor. Within the content, the search engine crawler will look for keywords, noting especially titles, headings, and sometimes meta tags. However, the algorithms of most search engines are tuned to recognize “junk sites” that are filled with only keywords in an attempt to trick people into visiting, even though they offer no real content. These sites will be ranked low because of the lack of quality in their content.

In the same way, when your content is fresh, unique, and of high quality, the people who discover your site through searches will not only read it and possibly revisit it, they are also likely to share it, through email, social media, or other venues. No matter how much SEO and marketing you do for your site, it is useless if your site does not contain quality content that people will want to see and read.

Remember to make use of the behind-the-scenes things such as the ALT text for your graphics and photos. Describing your images and including keywords in that text is a boost to your SEO. Using descriptive filenames (perhaps also including keywords) is also helpful. But the most important part for both search engines and people is unique, quality content, always.

Your goal is results, and your method is search engine optimization. Walnut Creek, it will take time, money, and effort to populate your website with the kind of quality content that is necessary to improve your search engine ranking, but it will be worth it.