When interviewing SEO companies to determine which to hire, you need to know the breadth of SEO before you begin. That doesn’t mean you need to know how to apply SEO to your website, but you do need to understand its facets. You also need an understanding of how it works, as this video explains.
Applying search engine optimization (SEO) to your website does not result in an immediate uptick in visitors. SEO takes six to 12 months to take effect. That’s the length of time it takes for search engines to spider your content and website’s meta tags and then integrate the results into their databases. As individuals search for terms in a search engine, it peruses the potential results in its stores to determine which ones use the term most often and in the appropriate context. It returns to the searcher the most applicable results.
Over time, many searches for the terms you targeted in your website result in your page ranking higher, as long as you used the keywords in appropriate ways. Search engines write their algorithms to parse out websites and blogs that misuse keywords. Misuse might include keyword stuffing, disguising keywords out of context, or using irrelevant keywords in a tags list.
Today’s search engine algorithms also check for proper grammar and clarity. The idea behind the algorithm is to choose the highest quality article or webpage to top the list on the search engine results page (SERP) so the searcher quickly finds the best result. The search engine defines best as the most clearly written, grammatically correct, well-researched, complete, and relevant article or webpage.
