In case you’re not in the know, SEO is the act of increasing your website’s visibility in search engines. This is done for all sorts of commercial purposes, but it isn’t trying to cheat a system; it’s about ensuring that people looking for topics or products like yours will find you and buy from you.
There are several key concepts in SEO, and to understand them properly, you need to know that the internet has exploded in size over the last ten years. At this point, there are billions of pages on the web and billions of searches done every day.
The common thread among all these millions of pages is that they’re trying to find something for a specific purpose. Search engines like Google can’t absorb everything, so it’s up to you to find ways to stand out amongst a crowd of competition.
As you’re about to find out, SEO encompasses a bunch of different “tricks” (or “techniques”). However, don’t worry. They’re all very logical and no more mysterious than designing a website. We’ll start by explaining the fundamentals.
SEO Fundamentals
Think of SEO (search engine optimization) as a built-in part of your business. Fundamentally, it’s about getting people to see your site and then keeping them on the site long enough to make a purchase. As SEO practices change, it is worth speaking with an seo company for advice and support on strategy.
On-page SEO includes the following:
Site Auditing
Site auditing is the foundation of SEO. It means that you will get a real understanding of where your site is at and know what needs to be done to improve it.
Keyword Research
This is researching the words and phrases your ideal website visitor uses to find your site. Once you have identified these keywords, you can start developing content around them to attract visitors.
Content Development
You will need to develop content for your site, social media, blog posts, and guest blog posts. The idea is to create content that is useful for your audience and brings them back to your site.
Off-site SEO includes:
Backlink Building
Building backlinks is an important part of site-building. Backlinks are links in a web page that point to other web pages. Backlinks are used by search engines to help determine rankings of a site on search results pages.
Media Marketing
This is buying and sending out press releases, videos, and email newsletters to media publishers so they can promote your business. This should be done regularly, at least once or twice per month, so as not to get ignored by media outlets.
SEO is a great way to get exposure for your business and help it reach out to potential customers. If you keep your customers in mind when you create an SEO plan, you will find that this method will bring improved results. However, it can be easy to allow unethical SEO practices to slip by in a competitive world – don’t. Google’s algorithm is often updated, and sites can be caught out and are hit with a penalty which can dramatically reduce your site’s traffic. It is important to understand the fundamentals of SEO, because if you want to be successful, then you need to take action to get results.
