Search Engine Optimization, commonly known as SEO, is an important aspect of running a successful website and is aimed at improving a website’s visibility on search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo to get more clicks.
What Is SEO?
SEO’s sole purpose is to make a website more attractive to search engines, convincing organisations like Google to add your site to their search index and encouraging them to rank you first.
These tasks are broken into two main section ‘on-page’ and ‘off-page’ SEO.
On-page SEO focuses on ‘the website itself and the stuff on it’ and includes tasks such as:
- Creating and optimizing content: Search engines love matching their users to relevant content which they will likely find useful. This requires the site to clearly outline what services it offers in the case of business sites, using keywords your site visitors will likely search for and having a wide net of content useful content.
- Setting meta tags, and images: Ensuring meta-tags are set correctly allows search engines to better interpret what is happening on the page and who might find it useful
- Improving site speed: Customers will click away from slow-loading sites and Search Engines will similarly penalise poorly performing sites
- Ensuring HTTPS and SSL is working correctly: Search Engines want to ensure the sites they are sending customers are secure and follow best practices
- Ensuring mobile-friendliness: For many sites, visitors accessing the site via mobile can be above 50%!
- Verifying search engines are correctly crawling and indexing your site: Ensuring search engines are actually finding and indexing the new pages is critical, technical issues such as an invalid robots.txt or overly aggressive firewall can prevent search engines such as Google correctly crawling the site.
Off-page SEO is the ‘stuff not on your website’ and focuses aspects like:
- Building quality backlinks that link back to the site and its articles: The more reputable backlinks that point back to your site, the higher ‘authority’ the domain will have and more likely to be valuable. These links can come in different forms such as being added to large Directories relevant for your niche, writing guest posts for other blogs in return for a link or paying another blog to refer to give your site a shout out.
- Engaging in social media promotion and real world influencer: Creating online discussion and interest not only helps build a brand and customer base, but also sends social signals across the internet to ‘pay attention’ to certain keywords or discussions
- Forum Participation: Being an active contributor to forums in your niche helps create discussion, labels your brand as industry experts on the subject and allows for opportunities to link back your site
Why Is SEO Important?
SEO is crucial for several reasons:
- Increased Visibility: Ranking on the top few search engine results is essential for potential customers to find your website
- Organic Traffic: SEO helps attract organic traffic, which is often more valuable than paid traffic as it consists of users actively searching for information related to your products or services
- Cost-Effective: Unlike paid advertising, SEO focuses on attracting organic traffic, which can provide a higher return on investment over time and is a long term investment over the life of your site
- Credibility and Trust: Websites that rank and are designed well are often perceived as more credible and trustworthy by users, which can lead to higher conversion rates.
- Competitive Advantage: Implementing effective SEO strategies can give you an edge over competitors who may not be as optimized or claw back customers
In conclusion, whether you’re a small business owner or a blogger, understanding and incorporating the basics of SEO is a valuable investment in your sites online success.