What You Need To Know About SEO
What Is SEO?
SEO stands for search engine optimization. SEO revolves around improving your own content to rank higher in organic (not paid) search results. When your website ranks higher, it will display higher on the search results page which means more traffic and more conversions. While SEM is more like buying visits to your site, SEO attempts to earn those visits organically.
How does SEO Work?
The goal of any search engine like Google or Bing is to deliver the most relevant results for a user’s search. Every time you enter a search, the search engine is trying to display the most relevant information to you and ranks them with the most authoritative and relevant ones first.
Google and Bing use various algorithms to determine what websites are relevant to what searches. Search engines haven’t been very transparent in revealing what exactly goes into page ranking, but over time marketers have figured out what can improve page rank. Your rank can improve from the technical set up of your site, your sites content, and your sites credibility.
Technical SEO
This involves optimizing the backend set up of your website. These technical aspects include page speed, URL structure, site navigation, etc. It is very important to optimize your websites technical elements to ensure that the search engine can crawl and index your website correctly.
On-Page/ Content SEO
On Page Content SEO is revolved around improving your site’s relevancy to a user’s search. Technical SEO is important, but the ‘meat and potatoes’ of SEO strategy is in your website’s content. If you want to be on the first page of search results you need high-quality, relevant content. When a search engine is crawling your site, you want it to be easy and straight forward to see what your webpage is about.
When developing content, it starts with keyword research, but your content can’t just be keywords; it also needs to provide context and make sense. To help search engines crawl a page, optimizing titles, H1 tags, meta tags and URLs is also important. You can also link other credible websites or to other places in your site if you talk about similar topics.
Credibility - AKA Link SEO
A huge factor in page rank comes from credibility, as a search engine doesn’t want to provide its users with inaccurate information. You can build credibility in a variety of ways, but a big indicator of credibility is from backlinks. A backlink to your site is when another website links to a page on your website. So if you are a dentist and you have an article on cavities, if ‘Men’s Health’ publishes an article, and links your website, this gives your website authority. The logic behind it, is that webmasters would reference a popular high-quality site rather than a mediocre one.
Link building is no small feat, search engines have become smarter with their algorithms and have been able to recognize links that may have been ‘built deliberatively’ to make Google think it is more authoritative. These types of links can actually reduce your ranking. You can build links by asking other sites, adding links to social media posts or business profiles, and earning links (when other websites link to yours without asking).