Does Search Engine Optimization Help Me? 5 Great Questions to Ask

Does search engine optimization help your online business?  Check it out!

These days, most website owners will have heard about search engine optimization, or SEO. It’s bound to have come up at least a few times when working on their web presence. But more importantly, what does it mean and does it really help you? Today we look at 5 great questions to ask that will help you answer the question, “Does search engine optimization help me succeed with my business?”

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1.  Are you running a business or personal website that people are going to search for?

A quality website should be based on something that is somewhat unique, but not so obscure it doesn’t have some kind of following. Of course it’s always possible to make an obscure website famous, but it would take a lot of work and time and likely, expense. If you’re just starting to look into starting a business or blog that you might want to monetize, try to choose something that isn’t too well known already, because if it is, it will be a huge battle getting your site to the top.

Image by Gerd Altmann

2.  Can you roughly describe your website with just a few keywords?

Think of when you do a query on a search engine and enter a phrase to find something you’re looking for. I bet you don’t go past the first few results before you pick something out that best matches what you said. The words you typed in are that site’s keywords. If you can’t create a website based on anything people would normally search for, then it probably wouldn’t work, so choose your content carefully.

3.  Is your website ready to handle all of the increased traffic?

Is your website really ready to handle all of the extra traffic caused by ranking high on the search engines? Maybe that seems silly to you, but it happens! If your web host can’t handle the surge of traffic, then your site will crash and eventually your website would start falling in the rankings. Putting the right kind of web hosting in place is extremely important, because once you start getting noticed, it’s very hard to move everything to a new host and keep your existing visitors.

4.  Are you willing to update your website often?

Are you willing to do the work to keep your site up to date as search engine ranking standards evolve? The reality is, search engines have to change their algorithms often and that can drop your ranking into the basement in just a few short hours if you’re not staying on top of things. You have to watch everything and tweak everything constantly to keep from potentially losing a big chunk of the traffic you’ve worked so hard to obtain. Search engine optimization is not a “one-and-done” operation!

5.  Do you know how to submit your website?

Are you familiar with the process for submitting your site to the various search engines and directories so they can start crawling it? The major search engines will usually automatically crawl your website after a while, but if you want to get the ball rolling, you should just start submitting it to them directly. This can take quite a bit of time if you need to go to a a lot of different ones. Learn how to find the page submission pages and carefully read their guidelines for what content they will accept on their search engines. There is software available offering varying results (for a price, of course) that can assist you in this process.

Image by Matt Reiter

Why bother?

So, does search engine optimization help you? Does it really matter?

People who run websites for their livelihood know that search engine optimization can make or break their sites. The majority of people going online for anything use search engines to look for whatever it is they need, so it’s important to reach out to them by putting your links where they can be seen. Don’t lose all of that potential traffic by being complacent. Bring your website up to date with proper search engine optimization!

Is your website already optimized? Tell us how it’s working for you. Be sure to leave your link!