What Exactly Is SEO?
No matter how long you’ve been in business, you’ve probably heard of the term Search Engine Optimization (SEO for short) and if you’re like most individuals, you’ve most likely wondered what it is and how it’s important. We’ve broken SEO down into simplistic terms that hopefully helps you understand it slightly more.
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the practice increasing both the quantity and quality of the traffic to your website through organic search results. You might think that the search engine you’re using magically replies with a list of links to webpages that could potentially answer your question, which is true, but have you ever wondered how it actually does this? A simple explanation of the magic that happens with search engines is that they have an automatic crawler that goes out and gets information about all of the content they can find online. After crawling the internet, the crawlers bring back all of the information and builds an index, which is then fed through an algorithm that attempts to match all the data with your specific search terms.
While it may seem like a simple concept, SEO is far from easy. Search engines take into account a variety of different factors to rank your site including:
The current quality of your traffic
The current quantity of your traffic
Current organic search engine results
There are a lot of factors that go into a search engine's algorithm, and here's how a group of experts ranked their importance.
Now that we actually understand the basics of SEO, we can dig into the best practices for SEO. Common search engine optimization best practices include on-site optimization, researching keywords, and building backlinks to a site.
On-Site Optimization
When we talk on-site optimization, we’re talking about your entire website and the countless different factors that are being judged by google. The most important takeaway from on-site optimization is to ensure that your website is providing relevant information to a potential customer and that you present this information in a way that is appealing to that potential customer reading your information. Getting into the nitty gritty details of on-site optimization, it’s important to research the following:
Link use on a page: How many links are there? Are they internal or external? Where do they point to?
What’s your page load speed?
What does your page URL structure look like?
How mobile friendly is your website?
Researching Keywords
Researching Keywords
The research stage of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can actually be quite fun and can help provoke thoughtful questions into how you can best grow your business. One of the best ways to improve your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is to write blogs that touch on relevant pieces of information that could be useful to your potential buyer, which can make you think deeper about what you should write about. When we research keywords for our clients, normally we use a platform called Ahrefs, which helps us identify top performing keywords that don’t have much competition.
Building Backlinks
This stage of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can be the most difficult and time consuming stage of improving your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) as it requires you to find websites that are relevant to your industry. When you find websites that fit your criteria and industry, you’ll need to find their contact information and craft a well written email, with an explanation and value proposition of why they should link their website to yours.
If you’re struggling to figure out how to improve your website’s Search Engine Optimization, we recommend that you check out our FREE Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Analyzer below and if you need further assistance, Schedule a FREE Consultation with us to see if we’d be a good fit to work together!
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