This blog is a beginner level review on what SEO is and what it can do for you, along with 3 best practices (both beginner and advanced) that you can integrate into your strategy.
3 Components to SEO
- On-page SEO refers to the content that’s “on the page,” and how to optimize that content to help boost the website’s ranking for specific keywords.
- Off-page SEO refers to the links that are directed to the website from elsewhere on the internet. The number of “backlinks,” and the authority of the publishers carrying those links, help you build trust in the eyes of a search engine.
- Technical SEO refers to the technical aspects of a website and improving them in order to increase the ranking of its pages, so actions such as making it faster, easier to crawl, and understandable by search engines.
While there is no “secret sauce” to ranking in search results, I’m going to talk about a few best practices that you can implement regularly. Outside of these recommendations, you should stay current on SEO news and best practices through continuing education and monitoring trends.
SEO Basics
SEO is not a one-time job. Whether you’re creating a brand new site or updating a current one, you’ll want to make sure your site has a strong foundation through technical SEO. You’ll also want to review your processes as you create new content and update old info through on-site and off-site SEO. And finally, you’ll want to measure and track your efforts on a consistent basis to ensure that your SEO practices are in fact helping you.
So, what is SEO? I’ll explain it to you this way: when you have a question, I’m guessing you go to Google to find the answer. Well, your potential clients do the exact same thing! Everyone has questions and problems they want solved, and they use search engines to find the answers. SEO is the practice of growing your site’s visibility in the organic search engine results so that when someone types in a query that is relevant to your work, you’ll show up in search results.
How do search engines work? Search engines, such as Google, Bing, or Yahoo, send out robots, also known as spiders, to crawl websites for content. The search engines then store and build an index, or library, out of this info. When someone enters a query into a search box, the search engines use complex proprietary algorithms to display results pulled from their databases. The ranking of these results is affected by the content’s relevance and popularity. Now, the algorithms for search engines change all the time, and I would highly recommend staying up to date on these changes by subscribing to their news and updates.
3 Best Practices for SEO
- A common on-site SEO strategy is blogging. Content marketing through blogging can be an incredible way to rank for keywords and engage your website’s users. Every blog post is a new web page that gives you another chance to rank in search engines.
- A common off-site SEO strategy is reviews. Within your Google My Business pages, it’s important that you allow your customers to write reviews based on their experience with you. Think of ways you can be creative in asking people to submit a Google review onto your Google Business page.
- Another common off-site SEO strategy is back-linking. Search engines calculate rankings based on a bunch of factors, and one of the most important ways is back-linking. A backlink is a link that one website gets from another. The quality of the link is far more important than the quantity. An example of a backlink is this: One blogger writes about you or your services (or classes), and then links to your website within their content. The more authority the website has, the more it helps your website to increase its own ranking.
There you go – a quick review of SEO and 3 best practices you can integrate into your SEO strategy. Hopefully these tactics help you get started with SEO so that you can leverage search engines effectively.
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