Jennifer Dickens
As a healing practitioner or spa owner, your goal is to support individuals in their healing journey by providing bodywork, wellness, and relaxation treatments. Your website is your online storefront, and how does your storefront get found on the internet? It is not found because you put up your website; it is found because your website (storefront) is optimized with technical elements which make it easy for people researching and looking for your healing touch and body work services to find you.
What is the definition of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – According to Wikipedia – search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the visibility of a website or a web page in search engines via the “natural” or un-paid (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results. In general, the earlier (or higher on the page), and more frequently a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine’s users. SEO may target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, video search, news search and industry-specific vertical search engines. This gives a website web presence.
As an internet marketing strategy, SEO considers how search engines work, what people search for, the actual search terms typed into search engines, and which search engines are preferred by their targeted audience. Optimizing a website may involve editing its content and HTML and associated coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines. Promoting a site to increase the number of backlinks, or inbound links, is another SEO tactic.
“Perfectly Optimized” webpages must incorporate:
1. HTML Head Tags (Title) – relevant and unique content and keyword term/phrase optimization in the Title, Meta Description, Meta Keywords, Meta Robots, and otherMeta Tags.
2. Body Tags – must be structured properly taking into consideration keyword repetition within content, keyword density, keyword usage variation, headline tags, proper image file name tagging, proper usage of bold and italicized content.
3. URL – considerations of shorter URL lengths, keyword locations, proper word separators and decisions made between subdomains vs. pages.
4. Page Architecture – keyword location and content structure are integral to successful page SEO.
5. Internal Links & location in Site Architecture – key terms/phrase click through depth, number of internal links per page, and link location.
6. Website Submission – properly submitting your websites to the search engines.
As you can see, SEO is a technical aspect of website development to get visitors to your website. The reason why it’s important to make sure your website is optimized is because 51% of products and services purchased on the internet came from people performing searches through google.com, yahoo.com and other search engines to find what they are looking for. So if your website (storefront) can’t be found because it is not search engine optimized then you are losing business and opportunities to support people in their healing journey.
Is your website optimized? If not, what can you do to optimize it? Stop back by to read Part II, which will address SEO best practices.