What is SEO?

2 January 2015

When you open your own online optical store you would have researched many options available for you. One of the main factors would be SEO. SEO is Search Engine Optimization, a very technical and often misunderstood term. Many people think that SEO is behind the scenes code elements that make your website Google friendly, better searched and visited by web surfers. SEO is definitely that, but way more than that.

As per Webopedia SEO is typically a set of "white hat" best practices that webmasters and Web content producers follow to help them achieve a better ranking in search engine results. White Hat stands for honest practices to get your website a high Google rank. There is also Black Hat – dishonest practices and Grey Hat – somewhat dishonest/honest practices.

Google is a multi-billion organization that lives of two things – giving users best search results to what they are searching for, thus attracting massive global traffic to use their search engine and by charging money for advertising on their own www.google.com and partner websites. What keeps Google together is the search raking algorithm, that needs to be balanced between giving users best search results and earning most possible money. If people can’t find what they are looking for in a few seconds after typing a keyword “Ray-Ban Wayfarer glasses”, they will leave to Yahoo.com or start typing other website names such as sunglasshut.com or worse, ebay.com. So Google has big teams of experts that work tirelessly to get their algorithm do the best job.

Google believes that there are two best ways to get your website highest rank for a certain keyword: pay for advertising or make your website good enough for Google to rank it for free. Google advertising is VERY expensive. You can easily shell a few thousand dollars on Google advertising without landing a single sale. Or you can spend your own time to make the website good enough to get same results free.

Since inception Google always said that if your website has best relevant content, it will rank. Google also gives many points to a website for each backlink (link pointing back to your website). The more backlinks your website has the higher the rank will be. Up until recently backlinks were more important than content and this is where Black Hat practices were relevant. Instead of paying Google $1 per click, you could pay $0.10 per backlink to so called Webmasters, usually using automated software or employing cheap labour in India or China to create backlinks to your website. This Black Hat practice costs Google billion dollars in advertising sales. So two years ago Google dramatically changed their algorithm to reanalyze the credibility of the backlinks and the content of the website. Overnight entire Google ranking list was shuffled and websites that have never been seen before came on top and Black Hat promoted websites disappeared. All of this was done to send a message to Webmasters that content is still a king and if your website is good enough backlinks will come naturally because people will talk about your website and link to it for free.

Content for optical web shops will be different from content for shoes web stores. Content is text, prices, pictures about what you are selling. This would be present on any optical web shop. There are thousands of them. But it’s also information about your company, service terms, industry news and much more. You will have to create content to get your website rank. And you will have to do it yourself. So for optical store owners who are looking for a best software for their online glasses shop, the best would be the one that makes creating new content easy. At LiveOptical we worked hard to make sure that our users, not savvy technologically, could create a new content as easy as chatting with the customer. LiveOptical takes all traditional methods of promoting an eyeglasses store and puts them to work on digital LiveOptical platform.

LiveOptical is SEO optimised beyond most of comparable platforms. It has all coding elements in place, plus it has tools to create interesting relevant content to get your webstore higher ranking.