SEO doesn’t always mean a paid ad. It can also be referred to as search engine marketing in some cases. SEO is a pretty broad topic, but it’s a necessary one if you’re serious about gaining more traffic. SEO allows you to stand out online, attract more customers, and make better business decisions.
In order to optimize your content for search engines and improve your search engine optimization, it is vital that you understand what SEO is and how it works. This is because it is a great way to make sure that you are serving your customers well and getting your products in front of potential customers who would want to buy them.
Each search engine prioritizes different characteristics of websites and web content, but by using top SEO tips—including following best practices for writing for the web, identifying and using keyword phrases strategically, and setting up your website’s technical implementation following established guidelines—you can improve your search engine optimization regardless of search engine provider.
But what exactly is SEO? And how does it work?
What is SEO?
SEO, also known as search engine optimization, closely relates to online marketing, though it has its own unique set of rules and strategies. It is an important part of any business today. It helps your content be found when potential customers are searching for what you offer.
The goal of SEO is to make your business appear in search engine results so that it can be found by people. If you want to rank higher, the goal of SEO is to make sure that people find your content first.
If they find your website through the results provided by Google, Bing, and other major search engines you’re much more likely to get noticed by visitors who are looking for your product or service.
You can use SEO to increase your search engine rankings, drive more traffic to your website or blog, and boost conversions with keyword research and choosing appropriate content creation techniques. You can run your business as a start-up with the right SEO tools and services, get the best content on your website in place, and then use the community to learn how to create more content that people love.
How Does SEO Work?
Search engine crawlers play a lot of work in SEO. They crawl the internet looking for anything the search engine provider wants to index, and then build an index of everything they can find.
The search engine crawlers follow internal links within websites and links across different websites. The bots look at the content on your pages (including the URL, title tag, headings, links, and more) to understand what each page is about.
Combined with the search engine’s understanding of your content, these factors turn an index into rankings for various searchers (also called “queries”). The more high-quality, authoritative content you create for your website, the more search engines will trust you as an authority on that topic, increasing your chances of showing up in search results.
The majority of online searches start with a search engine like Google. In fact, about 75% of those searches begin on this massive search engine technology Google.
To optimize your content in order to rank higher on Google and attract more eyeballs to your posts, you need to understand the ins and outs of search.
On-Page SEO
On-page SEO is all about your website. This includes things like using keywords in your metadata (such as title, description and metatags), writing unique, quality content regularly, and making sure that your pages are mobile-friendly and well-optimized for search engines. This core element of SEO has the power to rank you higher in search engines because it makes the content on your website more useful for potential customers.
Basically, it is about building content and improving your rankings. It is about building great content for your website that makes it easier for search engines to find you. You can accomplish this by incorporating those keywords into existing content on your site and ensuring high-quality, keyword-rich content regularly.
Websites with lots of unique and quality content perform better in the eyes of search engines, so incorporating keywords into your blog posts, product descriptions, etc. are great on-page SEO strategies that will impress Google and give you an advantage over your competitors.
It also includes fixing any broken links and crawling errors and making sure your metatags and titles are well written, all of which help SEO.
Moreover, if you have a few images that appear next to each other in the search results, having a higher-quality image results in a better position on Google’s first page.
Off-Page SEO
Off-page SEO is the other side of your website that’s not on it. The most obvious way to engage with search engines is by creating content, but other ways can help as well. Off-page SEO is the optimization happening off of your website itself.
Off-page SEO means a lot of different things to different SEO experts. This is because there isn’t just one right approach to off-page SEO. But the most important thing there, the core idea, is to build relationships with people who have a higher authority than your own so that they’ll help you get more links back to your site.
A key part of this is building relationships with sites you want to earn backlinks from, as well as creating great content people want to share.
Off-page SEO incorporates backlinking to authoritative websites, both inbound and outbound, as well as the content you publish on social networks and websites.
It takes a lot of legwork, but it’s integral to SEO success, as it gives you a way to be found by more users who are more likely to want what you have to offer.
SEO Strategy: Black Hat SEO and White Hat SEO
Black hat SEO is “bad” SEO. This type of SEO aims to get you some quick gains, usually by adding lots of keywords to your site and using non-publisher websites as backlink sources.
This type of SEO strategy is nothing more than low-quality, spammy methods to rank. Black hat SEOers intentionally manipulate their content’s visibility in search results or posts on social media, by cheating or violating user agreements, or otherwise trying to game the system
We’re not going to sugarcoat it: black hat SEO is frowned upon by Google, so even if you think it’s the only way to rank fast, you’re going to get banned. While some say it can be quick and easy, it won’t be long before Google catches you in their craw and penalizes your site for not following the rules.
If you’re not experienced in the world of SEO, then don’t try black hat techniques. These techniques can take years to weed out from your site, which will punish its search visibility for years to come.
On the other hand, white hat SEO is the way to build a sustainable online business. It’s search engine optimization—but with a purpose. If you do SEO this way, your website will be built for people, not for search engines.
If you do SEO this way, you’ll focus on your human audience, creating content that people want/need/use to find what they’re looking for.
