SEO Basics

Date:

Tags: Advertising · Marketing · Google Search
Categories: Getting Started · SEO · Website Basics · Search Engine Optimization

What is SEO?

SEO stands for search engine optimization. It means optimizing your web site to improve how it shows up in organic search results. Organic search results are search results that are not paid for and are different than paid search results. These days, at least in the US, the most important search engine by far is google, so the majority of your efforts when it comes to SEO for the US market should be focused on google search.

The most important aspect of SEO is doing work that results in your site ranking near the top of the list of organic google search results. There are other aspects of SEO too, though, such as shaping how your business and web site information shows up in search results. For example, you can affect what the search result for your business actually says and how it’s displayed on the search engine results page (SERP). You can also influence how your business or web site shows up in a google maps search.

What’s the difference between SEO, PPC, and SEM?

SEM stands for search engine marketing, and PPC stands for pay per click. The term SEM (or search engine marketing) is sometimes used more broadly to mean increasing visibility in both paid and organic (or unpaid) search results. It’s also sometimes used to mean paid search marketing or search marketing that’s mainly focused on paid search but also includes organic search. PPC (or pay per click) is a type of paid-for digital advertising.

Paid search can be useful because google sometimes displays paid search results before or more prominantly than organic results. It can also yield results quickly without working on SEO. Paid search results on google show a ‘Sponsored’ label, so you know that they are paid for and not organic.

On the other hand, many people know that google can prioritize paid search results and that paid results are not necessarily going to be the best results for them. As such, they will scroll past the paid results to see what the organic results are. A digital marketing strategy can often involve efforts to gain business by both paid and organic search.

What are the Most Important Parts of SEO?

The three most important components in any SEO strategy are the following:

Writing Content for Your Site

1. Write High-Quality Content that’s Relevant to your Business and Helpful to Your Customers

There’s no substute for good content when it comes to SEO. Google’s process for ranking web sites for searches is very sophisticated these days. You can’t just string together a bunch of keywords and expect to get great SEO results. It’s important that a website’s written content makes sense in the overall context of your site and is readable and meaningful to potential customers.

2. Cover the Topics that are Most Important to your Customers

Try to write about issues realating to your business that are likely to interest your potential customers. Think about what questions they might have regarding your business that you could try to help them with. What kinds of things might they be searching for answers about on google? By covering various topics relevant to your customers, you’re creating content that google could potentially use to return a search result. Further, you’re also demonstraiting your knowledge about your business and providing your customers with helpful information.

Backlinks are links to your site from other sites. They are essential to any SEO strategy. You can start the process of creating back links by adding links to your site on your social media accounts and any other sites that you own. You can also benefit from adding links to your site on various directories and blogs.

Metadata

When people use the word ‘metadata’ in relatin to websites, it usually means information about a web page that’s not meant to be rendered and displayed as part of a webpage. A website’s metadata is sometimes called meta information, meta content, or just meta. In a webpage’s structure, metadata is included in the head section, whereas the the content to be rendered and displayed is contained in the body section.

Metadata provides information to other applications such as search engines, web browsers, and social media. If you’re using a service like a website builder or a content management system (CMS) to manage your site, you should be able to manage your site’s metadata through the tools provided by that service.

The two most important pieces of metadata for SEO are as follows:

Page Title

The page title is used to display the title or main topic of a web page. Search engines can use it as the title of search results and web browsers can use it in tabs.

Page Description

The page description can be a bit broader than the page title in terms of its content. It should contain a brief summary or description of your webpage. The page description is sometimtes used by search engines to display additional information about web pages. This information can appear below the page title in search results.

Crafting good page titles and page descriptions is an important part of any SEO strategy.

What Other Factors are Important for SEO?

Many different things can influence your google search ranking. Some of these include the following:

Should I Make a Google Business Profile?

It’s a good idea to set up a google business profile for your business. Once your profile is set up, google can use it to display information about your business in web browser search results and in google maps searches. You can set up a google business profile for free, so it makes sense to set one up for your business.

Can I Improve my SEO?

While it’s quite difficult to try to rank well in search results in a nation-wide or global search for very broad search terms, you can see good results by working on your SEO if you narrow your focus. One of the best ways to acheive good SEO results is to focus on a local area. Sometimes, for example, people add ’near me’ to their searches. Another way you might narrow your focus is to create content for and offer a very specific kind of product or service. How effective you can be by working on your SEO really depends on how much work you put in to your SEO strategy (and your business in general) and the competition in your specific area of focus.

How Important is Site Performance in SEO?

Site performance is one of the factors that google considers when determining where to rank your site or page in the search results for a given search. It’s difficult to say for sure exactly how much google weighs various factors in their ranking procedure as they don’t disclose that information publicly, but they have indicated that site performance is definitely a factor.

What is Site Performance?

Generally speaking, site performance relates to how fast your website is. For example, does it take 6 seconds to the homepage to appear in your browser when somone tries to access your site, or does it take less than 1 second? If your site is slow, it’s bad for SEO, but it’s also a bad user experience. Having a site that’s fast and snappy makes your business look and feel more professional and competant, whereas having a slow or sluggish site does the opposite.

How can I improve my Site’s Performance?

There are many ways to improve your site’s performance. Often, one of the best ways to do so is by optimizing your images. If your images are very large, that can impact your site performance score. Often, better site performance scores can be obtained by using image formats that are optimized for the web or have smaller file sizes. Another way to improve site performance is to minimize the size of other files like video or sound files.