Most businesses owners hire SEO companies to optimize their websites. There’s nothing wrong with this if the SEO companies do their job. Think about the following questions for a moment:
- What happens if the SEO company goes out of business? Who will take care of your web optimization?
- What if Black Hat SEO techniques are being used? Do you even know what ‘Black Hat SEO’ means? If you don’t, your company’s website could be in danger of being taken out of search engines.
- If you have an ‘in-house’ SEO manager, what happens if they quit? Are your employees crossed-trained? Could someone pick up the work?
It would behoove business owners, especially small business owners, to know something about search engine optimization. Otherwise, your page ranking and web stats could decrease faster than you could have ever imagined.
Benefits of Knowing and Understanding Best SEO Practices
What really is Search Engine Optimization? (Photo credit: Go Local Search)
Understanding SEO is a good way to make sure your SEO company is doing their job.
If you don’t understand SEO, how will you know if your website is being optimized? If you don’t receive reports on a regular basis, how do you know if any optimization work was completed for a specific amount of time? You don’t have to know everything about web optimization, but it’s a good idea to know how to view your websites source code so you can check to see if your keywords were entered.
If your in-house SEO person quits, who does the work?
Sadly, most employees aren’t crossed trained. If your SEO person quits, your website won’t be optimized for too long. Who will write the blog posts? Who will update the web pages? It’s a good idea to cross train employees, especially if you own a small business. If you don’t want to learn SEO then one of your other employees should know how to do it.
Competitors in Your Industry Know and Understand SEO.
Let’s face it; technology moves at a faster speed than it ever did. If you don’t keep your skills up-to-date, you can find yourself going out of business. Customers expect businesses to be on social media websites because it’s a fast and easy way for them to connect. They also expect that a business is optimizing their website with keywords/phrases that will help them find what they’re looking for in a quicker manner.
What happens if your SEO company is using Black Hat SEO techniques? How would you know?
If you aren’t familiar with SEO and how it works, you could be in a lot of trouble with Google and other search engines. This means your SEO company is using unethical techniques to help your company gain higher search rankings. Unfortunately, search engines look for these unsavory practices and will ban your company from displaying in their results. Black Hat SEO techniques include:
- Keyword stuffing blog posts and web pages.
- Buying the wrong types of links (you should avoid this anyway).
- Invisible text — putting white text on a white background.
- Doorway pages are basically ‘fake’ pages.
You can save time and money.
If you understand search engine optimization (SEO), you could do the work yourself and save thousands of dollars each year. The drawback is that keeping up with the optimization can become time consuming.
It doesn’t hurt to know something about best SEO practices, especially if you hire an outside firm to take care of all of your search engine optimization. Remember, it’s important to use White Hat SEO versus Black Hat SEO techniques. If you know and understand how optimization works, you’ll be able to tell straightaway if a firm is using unethical practices.
There’s nothing wrong with becoming familiar with how web optimization works. It will only help your company in the long run. Technologies change overnight. What worked yesterday, may not work today. Updating your skills is a good way to ensure your company doesn’t lag behind other companies within your industry.
What’s holding you back from learning SEO? Share.
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SEO is extremely important for businesses of all sizes. I would highly suggest that businesses that have been in the industry for several years have their website redesigned and developed to ensure that there website is giving them the optimum web presents. With the Analytic’s tools that Google offers business owners can really understand what customers are doing throughout their site. Webmaster tools can help to refine the web pages along with many other aspects of the design and development. I found this article to be a great read, thanks!
Thanks for your comment! SEO has evolved throughout the years. What worked five years ago may not work today. Sometimes it can be overwhelming to keep up with the changes. Small business owners may feel as if they’re in over their heads. It’s good to have help from professionals that know what they’re doing.