SEO is vital for the success of any business online. It can be THE reason a potential customer buys from you or your competition instead. This article will examine why SEO is important and how to use SEO on your website, for your business.
SEO is the practice of making your website stand out to Google and other search engines so your site ranks high whenever someone searches for products and services you sell. This is the opposite of PPC ad campaigns. It can be called organic, free or natural search – because it’s not something you pay Google to do. Google will put your website in the top spot if your website is the most relevant of all the other websites out there, to what someone is searching for. As mentioned in our previous article, How to Get Found on Google, it’s extremely important to get to the top spot in a Google search:
This tells us a lot. First, it’s crucial for your business to rank very high in a search – the top website will get the most clicks and anything beyond the first page will likely never be seen. But it also implies that people trust search engines. Most people are immediately clicking the first link. They’re trusting that the top site is the best site to visit to find what they’re looking for.
It tells people that you’re the authority when it comes to your products or services – that’s why Google must put you at the top. It should be mentioned that it’s also important to rank high with Bing, Yahoo and other search engines. But Google is, without a doubt, the most used search engine on the net. Just take a look at these statistics from August 2014:
There were 18 billion searches in the U.S. during the month of August. Here’s where they were:
It all starts with the coding. Google and other search engines “crawl” or scan every website out there.
Search engines look for a few things:
For coding, search engines are looking for titles you may have never seen because they’re imbedded in your website’s code. This tells a search engine what that particular page is about. A website optimized for SEO would have a great title – one with words people are searching for.
Links are also important. If other websites link to yours, the search engines take that as a sign of your website’s relevance. Links to your site are kind of like endorsements by other sites. But you have to be careful about this. Google and other search engines know that people have tried to increase their ranking by getting their site linked all over the place and they have formulas to detect this. For linking to help your search ranking, it’s important to be linked from other reputable sites. The better the site that links to yours, the more it will help you rank higher. Not just any site will do.
Content is crucial to SEO, as well. In addition to crawling your coding and reviewing links to your site, Google and other search engines will also review every word written on your website. Then, when someone performs a search, Google will know which site should have the information that person is searching for.
Sites with more content have a better shot of reaching the top spot in a Google search simply because they’ve got a lot of words for Google to scan and potentially deem relevant to the searcher. However, search engines also look for sites that add and update their content regularly. Not only that, the quality of your content is important. Using duplicate content from another site or from your own won’t help. You need your site to be original and unique so it’ll stand out from the crowd.
Simply having a lot of content will help your website. But if you really want to rank first in a Google search, that content should be optimized for SEO. This is where keywords come in. This takes some time and research but it’s well worth it.
Keyword research involves figuring out what the most common terms people search for in relation to your content. So if you sell home furnishings online, you’d want to know if more people search for “couch” or “sofa” for example. Once you research how people search for the kinds of products or services you sell, you can adjust your website’s content accordingly. But just as Google knows when links aren’t legitimate, Google can also tell if someone’s overloading their page with keywords. There needs to be a balance. They keywords need to make sense in your content.
Your coding should be relevant to your content, the sites that link to yours need to be reputable sites and your content should explain exactly what you sell or provide to your customers. SEO isn’t about “tricking” the system. It’s about showing search engines that YOUR site is THE site to go to when someone searches for something you sell.
Mike Patel is the Founder and CEO of ioVista, a leading digital commerce agency specializing in eCommerce solutions. With a strong background in business and technology, Mike Patel has been at the forefront of driving digital transformations for businesses. He has successfully navigated the ever-changing landscape of eCommerce, helping companies leverage the power of online platforms to grow their brand, increase revenues, and optimize their digital presence. Under his leadership, ioVista has become a trusted partner with major technology companies: Adobe/Magento, Google, BigCommerce, Shopify, and Yahoo. He is dedicated to staying ahead of industry trends, adopting cutting-edge technologies, and continuously improving strategies to provide clients with a competitive edge. Mike’s commitment to excellence and client satisfaction is evident in every project ioVista undertakes.
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ioVista
We firmly believe that the internet should be available and accessible to anyone, and are committed to providing a website that is accessible to the widest possible audience, regardless of circumstance and ability.
To fulfill this, we aim to adhere as strictly as possible to the World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1 (WCAG 2.1) at the AA level. These guidelines explain how to make web content accessible to people with a wide array of disabilities. Complying with those guidelines helps us ensure that the website is accessible to all people: blind people, people with motor impairments, visual impairment, cognitive disabilities, and more.
This website utilizes various technologies that are meant to make it as accessible as possible at all times. We utilize an accessibility interface that allows persons with specific disabilities to adjust the website’s UI (user interface) and design it to their personal needs.
Additionally, the website utilizes an AI-based application that runs in the background and optimizes its accessibility level constantly. This application remediates the website’s HTML, adapts Its functionality and behavior for screen-readers used by the blind users, and for keyboard functions used by individuals with motor impairments.
If you’ve found a malfunction or have ideas for improvement, we’ll be happy to hear from you. You can reach out to the website’s operators by using the following email
Our website implements the ARIA attributes (Accessible Rich Internet Applications) technique, alongside various different behavioral changes, to ensure blind users visiting with screen-readers are able to read, comprehend, and enjoy the website’s functions. As soon as a user with a screen-reader enters your site, they immediately receive a prompt to enter the Screen-Reader Profile so they can browse and operate your site effectively. Here’s how our website covers some of the most important screen-reader requirements, alongside console screenshots of code examples:
Screen-reader optimization: we run a background process that learns the website’s components from top to bottom, to ensure ongoing compliance even when updating the website. In this process, we provide screen-readers with meaningful data using the ARIA set of attributes. For example, we provide accurate form labels; descriptions for actionable icons (social media icons, search icons, cart icons, etc.); validation guidance for form inputs; element roles such as buttons, menus, modal dialogues (popups), and others. Additionally, the background process scans all of the website’s images and provides an accurate and meaningful image-object-recognition-based description as an ALT (alternate text) tag for images that are not described. It will also extract texts that are embedded within the image, using an OCR (optical character recognition) technology. To turn on screen-reader adjustments at any time, users need only to press the Alt+1 keyboard combination. Screen-reader users also get automatic announcements to turn the Screen-reader mode on as soon as they enter the website.
These adjustments are compatible with all popular screen readers, including JAWS and NVDA.
Keyboard navigation optimization: The background process also adjusts the website’s HTML, and adds various behaviors using JavaScript code to make the website operable by the keyboard. This includes the ability to navigate the website using the Tab and Shift+Tab keys, operate dropdowns with the arrow keys, close them with Esc, trigger buttons and links using the Enter key, navigate between radio and checkbox elements using the arrow keys, and fill them in with the Spacebar or Enter key.Additionally, keyboard users will find quick-navigation and content-skip menus, available at any time by clicking Alt+1, or as the first elements of the site while navigating with the keyboard. The background process also handles triggered popups by moving the keyboard focus towards them as soon as they appear, and not allow the focus drift outside of it.
Users can also use shortcuts such as “M” (menus), “H” (headings), “F” (forms), “B” (buttons), and “G” (graphics) to jump to specific elements.
We aim to support the widest array of browsers and assistive technologies as possible, so our users can choose the best fitting tools for them, with as few limitations as possible. Therefore, we have worked very hard to be able to support all major systems that comprise over 95% of the user market share including Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, Opera and Microsoft Edge, JAWS and NVDA (screen readers), both for Windows and for MAC users.
Despite our very best efforts to allow anybody to adjust the website to their needs, there may still be pages or sections that are not fully accessible, are in the process of becoming accessible, or are lacking an adequate technological solution to make them accessible. Still, we are continually improving our accessibility, adding, updating and improving its options and features, and developing and adopting new technologies. All this is meant to reach the optimal level of accessibility, following technological advancements. For any assistance, please reach out to
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