Search Engine Optimization - What is it, and Why Should I Care?

Simply put, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process by which an unknown business or product can quickly become a known business or product, by taking a website or a link to a website and allowing it to be prominently displayed in the results page of any particular browser's search engine. There are a torrent of explanations for the process that are much more complex than that on the subject, but that is the long and short of it.

It's not exactly a secret nowadays that offering your services on the web is practically a must for success in today's world. However, it can be very difficult without the help of a good SEO company to rise up out of the flood of websites out there and get noticed. A good SEO Bristol company can take your product or service and get it the attention it needs from the buying community.

SEO operates under a number of different principles, but the most relevant to a local business interested mainly in selling directly to the members of it's community are Geo targeting and broad phrase matching. Like the name suggests, Geo targeting is concerned with matching up users searching for your terms relevant to your business within a certain proximity. So more people close to you are going to see your website than those searching the relevant terms, but are too far away to be really relevant to you. Using an SEO company to enhance your site's relevance to potential buyers in your area can make all the difference. Not only that, but by mixing Geo targeting with techniques such as broad, phrase, and exact matching, your website can be rocketed up the list and presented to millions of clients for much less money than you might think, if you're working with a good SEO company.

Broad, Phrase, and Exact matching are three different methods used by SEO's in a variety of contexts to locate key terms. As the name suggests, broad involves a phrase appearing without brackets or quotations in the search bar. The search engine will bring up results for any website it finds with those terms in any order. Phrase matching, performed by surrounding the terms in quotation marks, will bring up any websites using said terms in precisely that order, along with any other terms that happen to be there. Exact matching, performed by blocking the terms in brackets, brings up searches relevant to only those terms, and nothing else. Exact matching does not occur at all on the user end of search engines, but is only relevant from the business end, or for compiling statistical data, for instance when using a tool such as Google AdWords

How exactly did that relate to your business? How does that help you? All of this may seem terribly distant and remote, but that is precisely the reason why utilization of a reliable SEO company will work wonders for any local business seeking to get it's product or services out there. They simplify the equation, doing the work for you and allowing you to do what is that you do best; providing clients with what you offer, and not floundering in the confusing web of abstraction that the minutia of internet savvy appears as for most of us.

Read more about SEO companies here.