Introduction to Search Engine Optimization
A lot of companies think that SEO is only for tech-savvy individuals, but in fact it can make or break a business. The website is key to being able to draw in customers and connect with them. In order to get ahead in the game, getting found online has to be on top of mind. I'm sure you've already figured this out, but SEO is crucial for your business. If people can't find you online, they're not going to buy your products or services. That's where SEO comes into play.
What is SEO?
SEO is a strategy used to improve your website’s visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs). By utilizing SEO best practices, you can help increase traffic to your site and boost your ranking for relevant keywords or phrases. How? By creating content around those keywords or phrases and effectively promoting your content through a variety of on-site and off-site tactics including various types of link building. If all that sounds like Greek, take heart! You don't need to speak any foreign languages to understand SEO basics.
Why is SEO Important?
You may be thinking, "SEO is great, but what does it have to do with me?"
Well, if you want to get more customers and increase your sales through digital marketing, then search engine optimization is a must.
Doing SEO helps your business stand out from your competition by increasing your organic search visibility. You'll learn how to optimize the content on your website so that it ranks high when someone looks for terms relevant to whatever service or product you sell.
A solid understanding of SEO is crucial to business success in today's world. So let's get started!
Keyword Research
A large part of SEO is keyword research. Keywords are the words or phrases people use to search the internet. Think of them as your on-ramps to the information superhighway.
To find those on-ramps, you need a good map, and for that you can use MozBar (a browser extension) or a paid tool like SEMRush. These tools will help you determine what keywords are relevant to your business and also how competitive they are for ranking in search engines (SEO difficulty). You’ll want to focus on keywords that have both high relevancy and lower SEO difficulty.
Once you know which keywords are most relevant to your business, it’s time to start building out a list of target keywords that you'll use throughout your content optimization efforts—from researching new blog topics, to writing page copy, crafting product descriptions, creating title tags, and more. Make sure each keyword is relevant not only to your business but also has enough search volume (at least 30 searches per month) so it's worth targeting with content marketing efforts.
On-page Optimization
Your website must be set up properly if it wants to rank well in search. Technical SEO is a huge subject, so let's focus on the most basic and important principles of technical SEO here. On-page optimization is the process of optimizing an individual web page on a website, such that search engines can discover and understand it. This is what you need to do to optimize a page for search engine crawlers:
Title tags - title tags are meant to tell Google what your page is about, so write clear, concise titles that accurately describe your content.
Meta descriptions - like title tags, meta descriptions are short summaries of your pages, so keep them descriptive but succinct.
Heading tags - heading tags let search engines know whether or not specific text in a webpage is important. Search engines can also use this information to create indexes and highlights for their results pages. You should place keywords in the heading and subheading tags on your webpages respectively, with H1s as the most important headings and H6s as the least important ones.
Image alt texts - alt texts are text alternatives for images; they provide useful information about the contents of an image if images don't load on a webpage or if people using screen readers encounter them (since screen readers often read content aloud). Alt texts don’t actually show up on the front end of websites; instead, you can find them under “Properties” when you inspect an image. Alt texts should be brief but descriptive; Google typically only displays around 125 characters per image in its search results anyway. Put simply, if you have an image of something—like say , a pie—then give it an alt text like "Chocolate chip pecan pie." Don't get fancy! There's no need to come up with creative ways of describing something simple or straightforward (i.e., don't call that pie "A delicious treat"), because then Google won't know what it's looking at!
Link Building
Link building is the process of acquiring hyperlinks from other websites to your own. The objective of link building is to drive traffic to your website and increase search visibility.
Why are links important?
In short, Google uses links as a ranking signal and the more high-quality links a website has, the higher it will rank on Google. Links are also an indicator of popularity. But how exactly does this work? Google uses links as a way to find new web pages on the world wide web. Basically, Google discovers content through links (think about how you navigate when browsing online). Additionally, when one website links to another website, it often means that they have found something worth linking to on that site – this is also an indicator of quality content.
How to Get Started With SEO in Your Business
Search engine optimization (SEO) is an effective way to attract attention to your business. You might not know much about SEO, but you have probably built a vocabulary around it that includes terms like "keywords" and "link-building." You may have even heard the term “SEO-friendly” before.
We can help you get started with SEO. With the right information and a little guidance, you'll be able to identify the best keywords for your business, create content for your target audience, make sure your website is mobile friendly and fast, add internal links to your content, use external links wisely, and optimize your images.
Fortunately, you don't have to be a coding genius in order to get your business to the top of the search results pages. A relatively simple and affordable SEO strategy can do wonders for your web presence, and allow you to dominate your competition. You just have to put in a little bit of time to make it happen.