What You Need to Know About SEO

Search engine optimization — or SEO, for short — is the process of increasing the number and quality of organic searches that a website or web page receives. This is achieved by optimizing the site’s content, technical infrastructure and online visibility, using a combination of off-site and on-site techniques.

When someone enters a query into a search engine, the software “crawls” across the web to identify pages that are relevant to those queries and then serves up links to those pages to the user. Typically, the first result on the results page gets clicked more than the others, which means that SEO is a powerful way for businesses to attract targeted visitors and customers online.

The basic processes that underlie SEO are:

Whether you’re creating new content or optimizing existing content, it is important to understand what customers are searching for in your industry and the words they use to describe those products, services or experiences. This research should provide guidance for what keywords to target and how to optimize content to rank higher in search engines.

Once you’ve identified your target keywords, it is time to start building and optimizing the content of your website. This includes everything from tagging and organizing the structure of pages to writing effective meta descriptions (the one- to three sentence snippet that displays under a search engine result) and title tags (the HTML code that dictates how a page is displayed).

It’s also essential to have a solid link building strategy. The more reputable sites that link back to your content, the better. This demonstrates to search engines that your content is valuable and reputable, which helps it rank higher in searches.

SEO is not a quick fix, but when it is done correctly, it can produce long-term, sustainable growth in traffic, leads, sales and revenue. And best of all, it is a marketing method that keeps working for your business after you stop paying for it.

About SEO

While some people try to game the system by stuffing their content with questionably relevant keywords, effective SEO requires a deep understanding of what customers are searching for and how to craft content that meets those needs. It’s also important to keep in mind that Google’s goal is to provide the best search experience possible for its users, or searchers. Searchers want the most relevant results in a timely manner and Google’s algorithms are designed to accomplish that. If you keep this in mind, then it becomes much easier to create an SEO strategy that will deliver long-term, sustainable success.