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Search Engine Optimization and Small Businesses

http://www.forbes.com/sites/edmundingham/2014/10/23/the-seo-secrets-every-business-should-know/

This article provides recommendations for businesses to maximize the benefits they receive from Google searches and other search engines. This is referred to as SEO; search engine optimization. Depending on the type of business a company runs changes how their SEO strategy will be affected. Many problems arise when businesses do not choose a good strategy; sometimes a business will not receive enough visitors to their website, while others may receive many visitors, but those visitors may not necessarily find what they are looking for at that website, due to poor choice of keyword by the business owners. SEO clearly is a long term strategy that requires patience before payoff is received.  In addition, Google has become stricter recently in the way sites are evaluated. This means that not only relevancy will be considered when displaying search results, but user appeal will also factor into the results. Some key strategies to optimize payoff from Google searches are to constantly update content, choose accurate keywords, minimize technical issues on the site, and to get links from a variety of websites to the website in question.

These recommended actions are heavily linked to concepts learned in class. Many of the suggestions, such as making sure one’s website has minimal technical issues and updating content for users, relates to Google’s consideration of user appeal when displaying search results. However, the concept of getting as many page links to one’s website as possible relies heavily on the concept of authority scores and hub scores as discussed in class. If the website were considered an authority, and websites linking to that website were considered hubs, every other website linking to the website in question would have a directed edge toward that website.  Assuming that each hub starts with a score of one, and they all link to the single website, the first-round authority score of the website would be the number of websites that link to it. So, if many websites link to the authority, the authority score of the website will rise much faster. Then, the hub scores of the hub websites are equal to the authority scores of each website they link to. This means that if many websites link to the authority website in question, the hub score will be that much higher for all websites that link to it. Then the authority score can be recalculated based on these new hub scores. This process can continue indefinitely until a point where the hub and authority scores are normalized and compared. Clearly the strategy of increasing the number of links to one’s website is a strategy to increase one’s authority score exponentially, and therefore increase its PageRank. This higher PageRank will make it more likely to show up in Google searches, assuming it also has relevant keywords to the search in question (which, as mentioned above, is another thing to consider when determining one’s SEO strategy).

Clearly, the consideration of how to increase one’s PageRank is key in determining how useful Google searches can be for one’s business, which has a great impact on the success businesses can have on the internet in general. If one does not carefully consider how a website is designed and connected in the greater scheme of the internet, internet advertising may not prove to be as fruitful as one may hope.

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