Search engine optimization (SEO) is a hot topic in the world of marketing. But what exactly is it? And how can you use SEO to help grow your business and website?
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of increasing your website’s visibility on search engines like Google through strategic keyword selection, content creation, and more.
Keyword Research
Keyword research is the process of finding keywords that people use when they search. This can be done using tools like Google AdWords, Keyword Planner and Moz’s Keyword Explorer. You’ll want to find out what people are searching for in your industry and how many people are searching for it–the more searches per month, the better!
Once you’ve done a bit of keyword research, you’ll have an idea of what terms might work well on your website because they’re popular (and therefore likely to bring traffic).
On-Page SEO
On-Page SEO is a set of best practices that you can apply to your website, including:
- Keyword research
- Title tags
- Meta descriptions (also called “snippets”)
- Alt tags for images, which are visible when someone uses the “view image” option on Google Images. Alt text describes what’s in the image so it will be more likely to rank highly in image search results. It’s also important that you use logical file names for each image so Google knows what they’re about!
You should also make sure that there is enough content on each page and that it follows a logical structure. This will help search engines understand what your page is about without having to rely solely on keywords
Off-Page SEO
One of the most important part of SEO is off-page optimization. This refers to anything that you do outside of your own website, but it can be broken down into two categories: link building and social media marketing.
One way to improve your search engine rankings is by building links from other websites back to yours. In order for Google (and other search engines) to see these as relevant and trustworthy sources, they need something called ” PageRank.” The more high-quality sites that link back to yours–and the more authority those sites have themselves–the better chance you have at improving your rank on Google’s SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).
This can be done in two ways: through influencer marketing or through organic outreach via emailing bloggers or website owners directly asking them if they’d like a link from one of their posts/pages/articles etcetera onto yours (also called guest blogging).
Technical SEO
Technical SEO is a subset of SEO. It’s about making sure your site is set up in a way that search engines can easily read and rank.
Technical SEO covers things like:
- Site speed, which impacts both user experience and rankings
- Robots.txt file (a kind of “traffic control” mechanism)
- Canonical URLs (to avoid duplicate content)–this is especially important if you have multiple versions of content on your site that could be indexed as separate pages by Google or Bing
Conclusion
If you’re looking to get started with SEO, I hope this guide has been helpful. It’s not an easy process and it can be frustrating at times, but if you stick with it and keep learning new things then eventually your site will rank well in search engines!
