Phil Singleton

How Does SEO Work?

Search Engine Optimization in Kansas City

It’s not easy to get your website noticed on the Web. Your Web pages may provide the most important information about your Kansas City business, but still might not attract many new potential customers (because they can’t find your website!). One of the most effective ways to improve traffic to your website is by gaining high organic search engine rankings on Yahoo, Bing and especially Google. You may hear people refer to rankings as SERPs which means search engine return pages.

Let’s assume that you have created a Web site with authoritative, definitive content on a subject pertaining to your Kansas City small businesses. Your website, however, is so new that it hasn’t even been listed (or indexed) on any of the search engines. Your first step may be to submit your new Web site to search engines. The Web pages on your Kansas City company website should include useful text content, videos, images, guides, links and other digital resources. Even with the best web design and best kinds of content about your products or services on the Web, your site will most likely not be able pop into the top page of search results on the major search engines. When people search for your local Kansas City products or services via the keywords that are most relevant to your business, they may end up clicking on competing, lower quality Web sites because your site isn’t included among the top search results.  In most case, you need to apply SEO strategies and methods to propel your website into the first page of organic search results.

In terms of Kansas City SEO services, many KC search engine companies try to keep their processes a secret – usually because they are using risky, short-cut methods to achieve temporary search engine ranking results. Yet, the criteria for higher positions in not a secret. Search engines are useful if they provide their users with links to the best, most relevant sites on the Internet. If your website is truly the best for your type of business, it benefits Google, to list your website at the top of the SERPs. Your business just has to find a way, or an SEO consulting partner, to show the major search engines that your company’s website belongs at the top. That’s where our brand of Kansas City search engine optimization (SEO) comes into play – it’s a proprietary collection of methods and techniques a business owner or webmaster can use to attain higher search engine positions.

So how do we do it?  In the early days of search engine optimization, SEO companies focused almost exclusively on link building services, or back link building.  When we say ‘links’, we me a link from a third party website that links back to your website.  Google used to count (and to some degree, still does) the number and quality of links pointing back to your website.  Each link is counted as a vote and some votes are worth more that others.  This means that a link from CNN would be worth a lot more, in terms or search engine value, than link from a smaller, less trafficked website.  The type, method and even location of a link on a website has value as well.  The main point is that link popularity was the most important ranking driving factor for search engine rankings for many years.  An over emphasis on link building gave way to SEO companies trying to develop automated ways, shortcuts and by exploiting other loopholes in order to create a  large volume of back links.  This method worked for a long time.

Search engine companies have spent a lot of time and money trying to prevent people from ‘gaming’ search engine results.  In addition, new methods of online interaction, especially social networking, have give the search engines another way to measure website quality and relevance.  Further, the search engines have also developed new ways to detect, neutralize and even penalize link building techniques that violate their ever-rigid guidelines and policies.

Our main goal is to develop a website that has the best potential to achieve long term, sustainable search engine rank.  Doing it the ‘right way’ takes planning, time and commitment. Our ongoing SEO services include using creative ways to get you the optimal volume of high quality links.  We use blogging, guest blogging, direct outreach and other innovative ways to get high quality relevant links back to your site.  We also have unique ways to leverage your offline partnerships and traditional business channels into online assets.  We will develop custom, cost-effective methods to build your website with great video, graphic and text content.  We will also help you establish and strengthen your social network and online content distribution channels.  Our comprehensive business-like approach is very different than what you will find in design-only firms.

Contact us today.  Find out how we do it and what we can do for your Kansas City business.