Q: What is SEO?

A: Search Engine Optimization or SEO is defined as the procedure by which a website enhances its traffic volumes or quantities from search engines via natural or organic search results. When a website appears in a search engine result, the website gets visits based on how its ranked on the search result. From the internet marketing perspective, SEO considers how search engines behave for search queries and optimizing a given website for such queries using different procedures.

Q: Do I need SEO?

A: Research has proved that over 70% of internet users are searching for products to purchase or services to hire when they use the internet search engines like Google. The only way you can get the attention of such potential customers is to get listed yourself in the search query results. Google does index billions of websites, which makes it tough for a websites to show on the 1st page of Google for searches. That is why extra effort is needed to enhance your search engine visibility so that you get quality traffic for the products/services you advocate.

Q: If I submit my website to search engines, will my website show in the first page of search results?

A: Submitting your website to search engines can be done, but it doesn’t guarantee you that you will be on the first page of search results. Search engine placements depend on what keywords you have chosen to be indexed on and the amount of competition that particular keyword(s) has.

Q: I have had a website for six months now, but I cant see my website in Google for even obvious terms related to my website, can you help?

A: The reasons for the issue can vary, but broadly,

a. Your website hosts a text file named robot.txt which has barred Google bots or spiders to index your website.

b. The website structure has some errors due to which Google isn’t able to crawl your website properly.

As I said, there may be other reasons which need to be investigated on a case-to-case basis. You can contact us and we will be able to help you out diagnose and fix the problem.

Q: Can search engines index dynamic pages?

A: Dynamic pages or pages generated by CMS have some parameters in their URLs. These parameters normally do not choke search engine results as long as there are less than 3 such query parameters in your URL string. One work around is to have SEO friendly URLs which take keywords and key phrases from the title and replace those query parameters on your URLs.

Q: My website doesn’t show up despite submitting it to search engines…does it mean that I am banned?

A: Your website not showing in search engines does not necessarily mean that your website has been banned. It can be due to some errors in the website structure or your website content isn’t optimized for keywords that you are searching for. Your website must be linked to at least 1 other website and your content must be optimized for the keywords you want people to search for. As with everything related to SEO, it’s a matter of time and patience. You must have both of these to ensure that a SEO campaign is successful.

Q: Does creating a blog help with SEO?

A: A blog definitely does help in search engine rankings since a blog can be a place where you can generate unique targeted content for your website. If done properly, a blog can give you additional areas where you can show up in search results (such as Google blog search and Technorati blog search). Also, if search engines are aware of the constant content additions to your blog, it will ensure that it visits your website often. Search engines love content and this will help you gain more visibility in search engines.