As an entrepreneur and avid student of marketing, I’m always on the lookout for ways to build my business. It took a lot of dedicated effort for me to learn what I needed to know in order to ensure my Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and content strategies worked well together. And there are many things my business could be doing to improve how we do this. If the days were longer, if the weeks were less hectic, if we had more employees with not enough to do, if there were free funding available….annnnnd if pigs could fly, we would have a perfect SEO strategy and our execution would be flawless. But we are a small business making choices just like everyone else and the key point is that our strategy is working well enough to continue growing the business at a pace we can barely handle.

Small Business and Searching, Searching…

This isn’t technically a blog about SEO and there are people out there who are far better equipped than I am to wax poetic about the “how-to’s” of the topic. The interesting thing is, you could easily write an entire book about SEO and it would probably be pretty much completely out of date 18 months after you set out to write it. My staff and I have invested hundreds and hundreds of hours in learning about it and practising it, and we are still moving towards the granular, perhaps cellular, understanding that would certify us as SEO Nerds. But what we often talk about (among lots of other stuff) is that, despite the fact that SEO is a moving target (algorithms change and people’s online behaviour changes, etc.), high-quality links are still important for SEO.

What That Means is This:

As I mentioned, the search engines are continuously crawling the web looking at the endless crush of information that people are piling into it at the rate of trillions of bytes a minute. They need to find a way to figure out what it all means and they need a way to determine which information is important for what purpose. That helps them give suggestions for sites to the people who are searching for something. They make that determination in a number of ways, and one of the most important ones lies in assessing “what else” has connections to the information—say we’re talking about your website. If that “what else” happens to be a number of dead-end links or poorly ranked websites, or if there aren’t any links connecting to your website at all, then the search engines are going to feel that your website isn’t very important and they will rank it poorly.

If your website has links connecting it to some highly ranked and very important websites, however, such as an established and important media outlet or industry organization, then the search engines will think “Ahhhh, this website is important!” and give it a few more points in the algorithm that determines ranking. You will float a little higher in search engine results when people are looking for what you offer. We’ll be looking at some SEO resources in greater detail in a future blog, so stay tuned for more information!

Would you like to know more about how SEO can support your business? Please get in touch!

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