Search Engine Compliance

There is a lot to consider when trying to ensure that your website is search engine compliant. In this article, we'll show you how to keep your website in the good graces of all search engines and, more importantly, how you can guarantee any marketing campaign will succeed.

What Are The 3 Components Of A Search Engine?

All search engines are made up of three components. These three components work together when you create a website or a new web page. Once the search engine discovers your website/page, it'll inspect it and determine which category it belongs to and how highly it should be ranked. It will also push the site/page to a database to store helpful information. To break this process down a bit more, we'll go over each component of a search engine. To begin, we'll start with the crawler.

Crawler

Sometimes you might hear the term bots or spiders instead of crawlers. Regardless, the crawler is a program used to "crawl" or examine every website on the internet. Crawling through every website on the internet takes quite a long time, but you can speed up this process by requesting an index. It's typical to request an index whenever you publish a new page or when you add/remove content on an existing page.

Index

You cannot have compliance without SEO, and indexing is where SEO comes into play. Once your website has been discovered and crawled, an algorithm determines where your site should be categorized. Using SEO, you can not only help the algorithm determine where exactly it should place your website, but more importantly, you can influence how highly it ranks you in that category. Without SEO and properly optimized content, you may end up with a website with little to no traffic. Even worse, the algorithm may fail to understand what you want to be ranked for and can place your website in the wrong category. The best thing you can do is to either learn about SEO yourself, or hire a consultant that can help you ensure your website is properly optimized.

Database

The database is where every website is stored, including all information associated with each website. Information such as the website's owner, the host, any penalties for which the website has been flagged, etc.

Is Search Engine Optimization Legal?

Not only is it legal, but it is encouraged. In addition to Google having tons of content and educational material showing you how to appease their algorithms and execute quality SEO, they also work with SEOs to ensure they are aware of upcoming algorithm updates. In fact, weeks or even months before Google updates its algorithm, they publish material to help SEOs prepare. The information they put out in preparation help SEOs ensure their content will stay in Google's good graces once the update goes live, so their content isn't penalized. 

So not only is SEO legal, but Google and all other engines sincerely encourage it. In doing so, they can ensure that better content is served to everyone. SEO is ultimately about delivering the best content possible to the user. So all search engines encourage anyone to learn SEO as not only will it help content creators, but it will ultimately help the users as well. Using SEO to ensure you're following Google's guidelines isn't just about getting more traffic to a website, but it's about ensuring search engines can police websites and ensure that only the best resources are being served to users. If SEO can help your website/business, it might be worth reading our article walking you through the process of learning SEO. We'll help you understand everything you need to get started on your SEO journey. Whether you own a law firm, or a bakery, SEO can bring more clients in than any other form of marketing!

What Are The Four Basic Steps Of Search Engine Marketing?

Search engine compliance and search engine marketing go hand-in-hand. Search engine marketing is based on the goal of getting seen in search engines as soon as possible, for as long as possible. Not only is the goal to be seen by as many potential customers as possible, but it's also about doing so as cost-effective as possible. The less you need to spend on paid traffic in a campaign, the better, but in most situations, you can expect to spend at least some money on paid search/PPC advertising, as it's the fastest way to get traffic to your website.

Search Engine Compliance & Search Engine Optimization

The better your SEO efforts, the less you'll have to spend on paid search, so this step is game-changing. SEO deals with researching and gathering keywords, analyzing the competition, content creation, and analysis/adjustments. Once you have your list of keywords, you can begin collecting data from the top-ranking websites for your keywords. Once you have your data - and, therefore, your blueprint - you can create content. Once that content is live, you can analyze its performance and make necessary adjustments until you're where you need to be in the SERPs. Search engine compliance is really that easy, it's just a matter of research, content creation, and analysis.

Search Engine Compliance & PPC Advertising

Paid search is the act of paying search engines to show up in places normal websites do not. It is very obvious when a website is paying to be in a specific position, and the majority of users will ignore these results, but not everyone will. The users that do not ignore paid results - also known as ads - will be the bulk of the visitors you will get from a paid campaign. PPC/paid search is vital if your goal is to drive traffic to your website ASAP.

Paid search/PPC isn't as sustainable as SEO is, nor is it as affordable, but it can do something SEO can't - bring results over night. SEO will provide better results that can last months or even years, and all at a more affordable price. However, it can typically take 4-6+ months before you start seeing the results from an SEO campaign, whereas PPC/paid search can happen overnight.

Search Engine Compliance & Landing Page/Website Optimization

This step is paramount whether you're optimizing your landing pages or your entire website. The whole point of optimizing these things is so that you can get organic traffic. The most ideal situation to be in, is having your landing page/website on the first page of all search engines, while at the same time paying for ads as well. Doing this ensures you get in front of the most users more than once, driving up your conversion rates. Not only that, but the more traffic you can get organically, the less you'll have to spend on PPC/paid search. 

Analyze & Adjust

Once your content appears on Google, it's time to analyze its performance. Watch what it does. Does it show up on the first page and begin ranking immediately? Or are you not ranking at all, and it's showing up on pages 3+? If after a couple of weeks on pages 2+, it's time to add 500 words of optimized content. Maybe an image/video. Give it a week or two and watch what happens. Did you raise in the rankings? If so, and you're still not where you need to be, continue adding 500 more words of optimized content, and again, some images or a video. All there is to ranking is dialing in what the Google wants to serve up for your specific keyword.

However, you're not just analyzing and adjusting your SEO efforts, but your copywriting as well. During this process, it's important to make sure you are ensuring your conversion rates are where they need to be as well. If they are low, then you will probably need to improve your website copy to get your conversion rates up where they should be.

Conclusion

If you made it to the end, thanks so much for stopping by, and hopefully you learned a lot from this article. If you have any additional questions, or feel we've forgotten something, feel free to contact us and we'll help however we can! If you're concerned with search engine compliance, we've got a ton of resources you can check out in our blog to help get there. So, grab a cup of coffee, relax, and head over to our blog.