What is SEO?
As the internet expands and businesses shift their goals and attention online, search engine optimization is in increasingly high demand. Despite countless claims of SEO expertise and an abundance of freelancing gurus, there’s more to search engine optimization that most people think. Anyone starting out in the field familiarizes themselves with some key information.
Search engine optimization is the process of working with search engines in order to build the quantity and increase the quality of traffic drawn to a particular website. The most used search engines, like Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo, each have their own algorithms and standards for placing or “ranking” websites in their search engine results pages (SERPs). The higher a site is in SERPs, the more authority it has on the internet. Online authority refers to the trustworthiness, credibility, and respectability of a website or blog.
How to Optimize Websites for Search Engines
There are multitudes of practices an SEO company can pursue to help optimize a website to appear higher in Search engine results pages. The following are just a few of the best methods of building effective SEO for a website:
- Creating Content
- Building Backlinks
- Implementing Keywords
Creating Content
Content is the single, most important factor contributing to search engine optimization. The content on a web page is what builds the user experience. In fact, content marketing relies solely on content to market a website, brand, product or service. Internet users are engaged directly by content, which keeps them on a page. Content should be unique, informative, entertaining and, overall, engaging to internet users. There are many different forms of content to organize on various website pages, such as, of course, text, images, videos, and eventually, virtual and augmented technology are expected to contribute to content.
Building Backlinks
Sites linked to by other sites are likely of high quality and authority. Why else would they be linked to? When a website has established a network of backlinks, it shows Google that the site is credible, original, and worthy enough to gain the attention and support of other reputable websites. An SEO company will attempt to build backlinks in a variety of ways, including cold-emailing, guest posting, and internal linking. Cold-emailing is simply the practice of emailing web designers and other businesses and literally asking for backlinks. Guest posting refers to enlisting the help of authoritative bloggers and web designers to post content on your site in order to draw in traffic, but they will often link back to their own site as well, making this method a symbiotic relationship of sorts. Internal linking is building backlinks to other pages and content within your own site. This makes navigation easier for visitors and helps interconnect the different aspects of your site.
Implementing Keywords
Keywords are words that internet users likely use in their search queries for specific subjects. Performing keyword research for a particular niche or topic is an effective method of finding out how people are wording their search entries for that topic. Keywords relating to a subject should be implemented in both content and off-page aspects of a website, like in meta descriptions. Meta descriptions are those short summaries that appear below website links in Google’s search engine results pages. These help users find out what a website is all about before deciding to click on the link.
Search engine optimization encompasses a wide array of techniques and methods of making websites more visible to search engines like Google and Bing. The aforementioned are only a few of these methods, and the field should be researched adequately before anyone decides to jump into this lucrative, online industry.