It’s very easy to get lost and confused when first attempting to optimize search engine rankings. Whether you’re just starting your website, or you’ve had an existing site for years, search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the most important parts of getting it out there. Instead of going into it blind, you should take the time to learn about search engine optimization and the best way to use it.
What is Search Engine Optimization?
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of optimizing websites for increased searchability for a product/service. The more people see websites online, the greater the chances they capture business. Website visibility typically determines its ranking on a search engine, and firms constantly vie for the top pages to get the most attention. Typically, Google’s SERP features advertisements above the search results. This position is paid for by companies so that they can ensure placement on the first page.
Making it so that your site appears on the front page means it ranks well and has a good SEO score. This is why it’s essential to have an SEO strategy; it’s the key to getting people to see your website and spreading brand awareness. Using SEO is what makes it easier for Google to crawl and index your page (if you don’t know what those terms mean yet, don’t worry) to rank it among other websites. When developing an SEO strategy, it’s best to confer with SEO experts or take classes to learn about it yourself.
Who is this guide for?
This guide is for newcomers or people who know little about SEO and want to optimize search engine results for their site. It is designed to help you manage and create website content that can be searched using Google. The guide will help you through the basics of SEO for the most effective and streamlined search engine optimization process. The best way to understand basic SEO techniques is through this article and online guides or agency professionals. This guide is no secret for Google ranking your website first, but good practice can make your content end up on the first page in the top 10 search results.
Begin to Optimize Your Website
Many factors go into optimizing web pages with SEO tools. The best website owners have already implemented search engine optimization into their websites, so it’s time you do too. Taking a few extra steps to optimize your site can make all the difference to bringing in organic search results and help search engines to discover and put your page higher on search rankings.
On-Page Optimization for SEO
On-page optimization are measures you can take to improve your SEO score from within the website. The following steps will be necessary when you are implementing your keywords into your content and optimizing your page. Every page in an online business page must aim towards a key term and a collection of relevant keywords. Optimizing your whole site will help you to spread brand awareness and establish authority online.
Keywords and keyword research
Keywords are an essential part of content optimization. When you use the right keywords and keyword clusters, your content will have a higher SEO score than if you just wrote an article without doing any research. Keywords help search engines understand what your content is about in order to rank it in search queries. When your content is ranked high, it will increase your site’s organic search traffic.
Being able to do keyword research is essential to optimizing your content. There are various online platforms that offer free keyword research help, such as Wordtracker and WordSteam. With these sites, you can put in a keyword or phrase you would like to rank for, which will tell you the search volume, competition, and other related keywords you can use. Remember to do keyword research before writing a new piece of content or editing an old work.
When reviewing the related keyword or keyword phrases, you’re going to want to pick the keyword with a high volume of searches but lower competition. If your website has low authority and you chose a keyword with high competition, it’s going to be hard to outrank other sites that are well recognized with a lot of page authority. That’s why it’s vital to do your keyword research and understand what you are researching.
Page Title
Despite only being a few words, your page titles are essential. It is the first impression to the reader and is one of the key factors of whether or not they will click on the site. Using striking power words like ‘best’ or ‘profit’ can invoke emotion in the reader and influence them to click. Avoid making your title longer than 8 words or 60 characters because it can be lengthy and hard to read, and the title will be cut off. Making your title too long will impact your SEO score negatively as well, so it’s best to come up with something short, powerful, and engaging. You will want to include your keyword or keyword phrase in your title as well.
Headings of your body paragraphs
Like the title, your article headings are important. The headers don’t work precisely the same way as titles do. H1 and H2 are used to describe the headings in your article. Your headings should include your keyword or other related keywords to the subject you are writing about. Not only does this help search engine algorithms understand what your page is about, but it also helps your readers. A table of contents is often added to the beginning of the article to help a reader navigate; if your headings are not descriptive or telling, your readers may leave because they don’t see what they want.
Body Paragraphs
Unless you are writing with a specific limit, there is no magical number that you should always be writing at. If you’re really not sure how much to be writing, around 500 or 1000 words are always good ideas. At the end of the day, the amount you should be writing depends on your topic and competitors. If you use a program like Surfer, it will analyze your competitors and tell you ranking factors like word count, how many pictures you should have, paragraphs, and headings. While this is a fantastic feature, the membership can be pretty pricey for website owners that are just starting out.
Instead, you can research your competitors by looking up the keyword you’re going to be ranking for and seeing what articles are already ranking high. By looking at the top articles, you should have a more precise idea of what your structured data should look like. If the top web pages are lists, make lists; if they’re in steps, make steps. You should follow what is already ranking high because it means it’s doing well and providing a positive user experience to the readers of the web page. You can also determine your word count this way by taking the word count of the articles already ranking for your keyword and finding the average. It’s okay if you go a little over or under that way.
Using internal and external links
While it may not seem like it, having external and internal links on your web page is very important. Page authority has a lot to do with your backlinks, which are other sites linking to your website, aka external links. That’s why sites like Mayo Clinic or Amazon have very high site authority. Internal links are when you link from within the same domain; it’s like saying, “if you enjoyed this article, you might enjoy (name of another article you wrote).
Not only do these two factors increase your SEO score, but they also redirect your audience between sites or web pages they may be interested in. If you want to attract links to your website, it’s best to write informational content as it’s the most commonly referenced. When other sites link to your web page, it brings you relevant traffic from site to site. Often to gain more external links, web pages will work together and do things called guest posts. Guest posting is when you write a post for another site in order to gain a backlink or relevant traffic.
What does crawling, indexing, and ranking mean
Crawling is when search engines discover new content and URLs all over the internet. Search engines use things called web crawlers to do this process. After crawling, the search engines index the latest content by storing the information it found and organizing it along with other content that it is similar to. The content is then ranked by what search query it would best answer, determined by relevancy.
These three terms go hand in hand because they are the process that Google, the dominant search engine, uses to display content on the internet. It’s important that you understand this process so that you know exactly what happens after you publish something and why it won’t be ranked as soon as it’s posted.
Other terms to know
Often when learning about a new subject, there are many terms and phrases you might not understand. Here is some commonly used vocabulary in the SEO field.
- Traffic – People visiting your site’s pages
- Organic Search Results – Search results that are not paid for as opposed to ads
- SERPs – Search engine results pages
- Search Engines – Searching programs such as Google, Bing, etc.
- URL – Uniform Resource Locators or the web address that shows up in the top search bar when you click on a link
- SEM – Search engine marketing
URL structure
Your site’s URL structure can be important both from a tracking perspective (you can more easily segment data in reports using a segmented, logical URL structure) and from an SEO perspective. Again, avoid the temptation to use keywords; make an easy to understand URL. It would be best if you never modified the URL; even if the URL is not “pretty,” you don’t want it to affect users. Your URL should not be over 60 characters or overly complicated. If it is, it will be harder to remember and negatively affect your ranking.
Editing existing content
After posting something, you can always go back and edit it. It will be much easier to do this process using some of the SEO tools and the SEO strategy you’ve learned today. If it would help, you can go back and make a list of important steps in optimizing your page. Pay attention to big things like your work’s title, headlines, and structure. It’s usually easier to start a new piece of content with the SEO strategy in mind, so don’t be too hard on yourself if you can’t get the best score with an already existing piece of content.
Meta descriptions
Meta descriptions are what people see as a description under your website on the search results page. Unlike title tags, you can add meta tags in the page’s code to make it appear in search listings, but they can’t appear in your page’s HTML code. If you write an exciting meta description for your site that makes people click, you will have an excellent result. Be aware that being listed in Google results is one of the most crucial steps in your career.
Google Ads
Google ads are online advertisements that you can buy and will show up when people search subjects relating to what you sell. Buying Google ads is an excellent way to get your products to the top of the search results page so people will see them and be more likely to buy them. By purchasing ads, you will increase your paid search traffic and have an advantage over other websites that rely on organic search traffic.
Mobile pages
Optimizing your site for PC or laptop viewing means you should also be optimizing your web page for mobile pages. Not all traffic comes from computer users, many mobile users are searching as well. That’s why it’s vital to make sure your site looks good on both devices. Accelerated mobile pages give mobile users a great experience and bring more traffic to your own site.
What Does SEO Do
Builds trust and credibility
Sites ranking high in SERPs (search engine result pages) are considered to be the most trustworthy. The results shown on this first page have the most relevant results, thereby giving a firm or site greater legitimacy. A website needs to have an effective website that helps to rank high in search results.
Ranking high in SERPs means your website has high quality content and is well optimized. It also means that your site will have more organic traffic, and you will spread brand awareness. Even ranking on the first page will bring many people to your site because people are more likely to click websites that are on the first page, if not the first ones that pop up.
Provides a competitive advantage
Generally, if SEO is used correctly, those who are doing it more and better can outsmart their competitors to optimize search engine results. In fact, many business owners don’t even think of their place on search engines. However, if your team is working towards their goal and showing up to competitors, they are gaining an advantage. If you are dedicating a good amount of resources and time to SEO, you will surely have the edge over your competitors who are doing nothing with their sites.
Reaches more people
SEO attracts customers at any stage of their customer journey, no matter the stage. It is primarily used to lure audiences to a particular product using keywords that they search for. A business may choose a specific keyword to rank in their search engines, and the content should include the keyword and related keywords. By using an effective SEO strategy, you are exposing your website to more people and increasing the chance of them buying or following your page.
Ranks better in local search engine results pages
It is now common to use a local search to find products near us. In this search, an organization can create a GoogleMyBusiness account to optimize their business listing for local searches. If you create one of those accounts for your business, people will see it as more trustworthy, and it will appear if you are in their area. This means that you will rank better in a local search (like when people search ‘near me’ or their city name) if you create a business account with Google and optimize your website with SEO.
As marketing strategy
Search Engine Optimization isn’t the most useful approach for every website; other digital marketing strategies can also work better, such as a pay per click campaigns, according to website operators’ objectives. Search engine marketing is a method of developing, running, or optimizing an advertising campaign. Unlike SEO, the difference can usually be explained as being just a difference between paid and unpaid priority rankings. Search engine marketing, SEM focuses more on prominence and relevance. Site developers must take SEM seriously, considering visibility as most users go into the main search results.
Get quantifiable results
Google Analytics is a good tool to measure the effectiveness of SEO. It provides detailed statistics for traffic, and data includes pages that customers visited and keywords searched for. Google Analytics can then correlate this information in terms of targeted actions to find out how a search engine optimization strategy plays an important role in the success of achieving customers.
FAQs
What is the importance of SEO?
Search engine optimization is a method to optimize a site so that it is easily searchable for the keywords users are looking for on the site. Often called SEO, it is an application that helps search engines find and index websites. When your website has good SEO, it will be more likely to rank higher, meaning more people will see and visit your site when searching the keywords used in your content.
While the concept is quite simple, the majority of newcomers to SEO continue to ask about the basics and wonder what to do. Without practicing SEO, your website is not going to get very far or rank high in Google search results or other search engines.
How does SEO work?
Although search engines offer ways to increase searchability, search algorithmic manipulation will never be easy. SEO requires a lot of action and time. The search engine marketing strategy doesn’t need anything changing right away in the hopes of getting clear outcomes tomorrow. The web is primarily about promoting and improving websites that provide search-related content. Google uses bots to search websites and collect and store this information in an index. These databases act like a library when you search for something — search engines like librarians.
How do search engines work?
When you first post a piece of content or update something on your website, you might be wondering how the search engines understand what you’ve done. Search engines use a variety of on-page and off-page factors when determining an SEO score. Don’t expect an instant change in ranking as soon as you make a change; it could take anywhere from 3 to 6 months or more. Search engine traffic is primarily dependent on search rankings.
Google’s updated search engine takes into account things like previous searches and user search intent. This gives the searcher a better and more customized experience. The search result that appears depends on the keywords used in the article and search. If there are similar or the exact keywords used, then the web pages containing and optimized for them. Other search engines may work differently, but Google search console is the most dominant search platform.
What is effective in driving search engine traffic?
Google accounts for a majority of all searches on the web today. It may vary from industry to industry, but in general major search engines may be the dominant player your business would want to appear. Still, the best practices described here are the best way for your site to rank in other Google searches. How will you find a website to find a particular person searching on your website? How can we gain traffic to our website? This is a highly complex algorithm that is very well developed.
Conclusion
Whether you’re just getting used to SEO or are entirely new to it, you can refer back to this guide at any time! At every step of your journey, it’s important to keep search engine optimization in mind. Even if you feel like it’s too much, there are plenty of free resources you can use and free certifications you can earn. You could also take the easy route and hire a freelancer to write content for you or contact a company that will optimize your whole site for you! Remember, don’t sweat it! You don’t have to get a perfect SEO score on your content; as long as it’s above 70, you will be doing just fine!