If you have a website and you want to increase traffic to it, SEO should be an important part of your marketing strategy. SEO is a great way to get and keep people on your site. But what actually does it do? Our goal is to explain what SEO is so you can start doing it right away!
What is SEO
The goal of search engine optimization (SEO) is to make a website more visible when people search for products and services. Search engine visibility increases a website’s chances of capturing business. Site visibility is typically measured by its ranking on search engine results pages (SERPs). There’s always a race for the first page, where companies are most likely to get attention. Search engine results pages, such as Google, feature ads at the top. Businesses are willing to pay for these positions in order to achieve placement on the first page of search results.
As a result of the SEO process, businesses can increase organic search traffic by increasing their search results, which are called organic search results. The following are the regular search listings, which marketers and search engines refer to as organic search results. The data marketers can then distinguish between traffic coming from paid search, social media, referrals, and organic search from traffic that comes from other channels.
Search engine traffic is usually more valuable, since users are actively searching for a particular topic, product or service that a site might rank for. If a user finds the site through a search engine, it can result in improved brand engagement.
How Does search Engine Optimization (SEO) Work?
A website’s SEO works by optimizing its content, conducting keyword research, and earning inbound links to increase the rankings and visibility of that content. It can take months for SEO efforts to fully materialize, even though you can generally see results on SERP once a webpage has been crawled and indexed by a search engine.
Rankings
Search engines use this to determine where a particular web page should appear in SERPs. A web page can rank for one position at a time, starting at position zero through the final number of search engine results for the query. The ranking of a web page can change over time due to the age, competition in SERPs, or changes made by the search engine itself.
Visibility
The term “search visibility” describes how prominent a particular domain is in a search engine result. Low search visibility means a domain does not appear for many relevant searches, whereas high search visibility means the opposite. Both are necessary for achieving the two main SEO objectives – traffic and domain authority.
See More: What is Digital Marketing ?
Why is SEO important?
You created a website so people can buy your product, subscribe to your service, or read your content. No matter what your goal is, you want people to visit your website. Suppose you own a donut shop in Amsterdam and you want your website to be number one when people Google: “donuts Amsterdam”. If your website is the top result, you have a much higher chance of people clicking on it!
How do you make this happen? There is only one word to describe SEO: Search Engine Optimization! SEO is a great way to get free traffic to your website. It’s especially useful for small business owners who don’t have a lot of advertising budget.
Types of Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
In order to rank on Google for a particular keyword, you need to apply SEO. Two strategies can be used here:
- Off-page SEO
- On-page SEO
Off-page SEO
The off-page SEO process is another way to improve your search engine ranking. Furthermore, it strengthens the credibility of your website and builds trustworthiness. Among the other benefits of off-page SEO is an increase in traffic, page rank, and brand awareness.
Link building is mostly associated with off-page SEO. A link building strategy involves acquiring links from other websites to your own website. The process of building external links is also called external link building. Link building is always about content. Having quality content allows you to optimize it for relevant keywords and rank. You can attract external links by having high-quality content in your off-page SEO strategy.
On-page SEO
On-page SEO involves optimizing website elements. When you do this, you need to consider certain factors. As an end user, you can control all of these elements.
Keyword Research: You should understand what keywords you want to rank for before you do anything with your website. In order to do this, you need to conduct keyword research. During this process, you choose primary and secondary keywords around which you will build content and meta tags.
Title Tag: The title tag displays the summary of your website’s content on search engine results pages. As the most important factor of on-page SEO, it also influences click-through rates. The first 50–60 characters of the title tag are displayed by search engines.
Meta Description: Meta descriptions are brief summaries of the content of a webpage. On the search engine results page, they are also displayed. When compared to the title tag, the meta description gives users a better idea of what your website is about. The meta description also affects the click-through rate.
URL Structure:A URL is an Uniform Resource Locator. Use SEO-friendly URLs, since they help visitors understand what the webpage is about. Poor URL structure is a big problem in SEO, which may result in a lower Google ranking.
Header Tags: You can use header tags to identify headings and subheadings within your content. A page’s header tags go from H1 to H6. H1 is the main heading, H2 is the subheading, etc. These tags help search engines to better understand your content.
Final Thoughts
The goal of SEO is to improve a website’s ranking in Google’s – or another search engine’s – search results.
I hope you found this guide useful because it contains a lot of information. Refer to this guide as you go along to make the most of your SEO marketing efforts. It is important to remember that there are no shortcuts in this field. You need to do things the right way and go the extra mile to stand out.