Search engine optimization (otherwise known as SEO) may, to you, be Internet jargon that you’ll never understand. Maybe you’ve heard it in talks amongst the computer guru’s in your life, but you’ve always shrugged it off as something that you need not pay attention to. If you’re in the world of blogging, dismissing SEO as something for someone else to worry about is a huge mistake. For this reason, it would behoove you to do a little digging, to discover a little more about SEO so that you can implement some changes within your blog because these little changes will benefit your blog. Let us show you why SEO is so important for your blog.

It Drives Traffic to your Website

First and foremost, SEO serves as a powerful tool to drive traffic to your blog. How? Several ways, but the most powerful way is by placing you at the top of the search engine rankings whenever someone does a quick search regarding a keyword in your blog. For example, a photographer in the Raleigh, North Carolina area who has implemented SEO strategies will be pleased to discover that when a newly engaged woman is searching for “wedding photographers in Raleigh”, they’ll be at the top of the list. Why does it matter? Because no one these days scrolls down to the bottom of the list and clicks, “Page 2”. The results we are looking for are, more often than not, on page one. Don’t get me wrong. It takes a lot of effort to have your site listed on page one of Google search results. Having fresh content on your site signals the search engine crawlers to visit your site more often which may give you that little boost up the rankings.

In driving traffic to your blog using many SEO methods, you’ll notice conversion rates are higher, and your visitors will turn into repeat customers or just readers of your blog.

It Caters to Your Visitor

SEO is not only great for you in terms of driving traffic to your website, but it’s also great for your visitor or customer. Consider that we live in an age of convenience, where we don’t typically want to do anything that isn’t extremely convenient for us – we like information fed directly to us, as quickly and easily as possible, preferably with pictures. When you optimize your site with SEO, your visitor is fed helpful information from the get go, in the web site meta-description immediately following a search. A visitor pulls up search results for “Raleigh North Carolina wedding photographer”, and a well SEO optimized site will pop up first, with an effective 160 character (or less) company description right below it: “Husband and wife film photographer team based in Raleigh, with three different packages to offer. Contact us for more information!” Sites that are not SEO optimized may have a haphazard meta-description that has been pre-populated by other content accidentally or by default: “Destination wedding: Beaufort, South Carolina. Lovely details by Pretty in Pink”. Which one are you more likely to click on? The one that feeds you the best information in the quickest fashion.

Hyperlinks Create Relationships

Hyperlinks are key to search engine optimization, that can expand your reach in a little piece of the ever widening world wide web. When you highlight a word and then click the tiny chain link in your WordPress tool bar initiates the process of inserting a web address within the word. This is called anchor text. You’ll notice that the word changes to a different color, and is sometimes underlined in your blog post. Why is this important? Hyperlinking is an extremely powerful tool for SEO, and one that only builds your online reputation and portfolio among vendors and others in the community that matter to you. When a photographer links to another vendor’s blog, the other vendor will more than likely reciprocate. The result? A strengthening relationship across vendors and the invitation for someone else to highlight your work on their site.

SEO isn’t really overwhelming, until you get into the nitty gritty of coding and metadata, but leave that to the professionals like Writocity. In the mean time, we’ve given you some great reasons to look into SEO optimization on your own terms, as it links you to valuable sites, drives traffic toward your own, and makes your information super convenient for your visitors.

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