What Does Search Engine Optimization Mean?
SEO is a digital marketing acronym that is short for search engine optimization. This is a process in which you optimize your site in order to gain organic, or unpaid traffic from the search engine results page. To put it differently, SEO involves making certain adjustments to your website content and design that make your site more appealing to the search engines. You do so in order to remain competitive in the market and so that the major search engines will show your website as a top result on the search engine results page (SERPS).
Even though search engine optimization can seem quite complex because of all of the different elements that influence your position, the basic process is not quite as hard to understand. Search engines want to deliver the very best support for their users. This means delivering results on the SERPS which aren’t just large quality but also relevant to exactly what the searcher is looking for.
So as to do this, the search engines will crawl and scan, different websites to better gauge what the site is about. This helps them produce more relevant result to individuals that are hunting for certain topics or keywords. If a user is looking for a new camera, the search engines want to make sure that information on cameras comes up, not information about bathing suits.
What goes into SEO?
To understand the true significance of SEO, let’s break down that definition and look at the components:
Quality of visitors
You can attract all the traffic in the Earth, but when they are visiting your website because Google tells them you are a source for Coffee Mugs if actually your site making fun of people’s shots, then that is not quality traffic. Rather you want to draw visitors that are really interested in products or services in which you offer.
Quantity of traffic
Once you have the ideal folks clicking through from SERPs, increased traffic is what you are looking for.
Organic results
Ads make up a substantial portion of many SERPs. Organic traffic is any traffic that you don’t need to pay for. The goal is to come up on the first page for as many terms as you can.
What Impacts SEO?
Now that you understand what is SEO and how it works, let’s take a deeper dive into some of the factors that could affect your search engine optimization and organic rankings. Search engine leader, Google will not give away the specific algorithm that they use to rank sites. But, we do have a fairly good understanding of some of the elements that impact search engine results page rankings.
On-site SEO
The on-page SEO variables are those components that occur on your own site. These are the things which you’ve got total control over, meaning you may work to improve these variables over time by following best practices for SEO.
Here are some of the most important on-site elements that you want to make sure are optimized across your website:
- Title Tag: The title tag on each page tells the search engines exactly what your page is about. This should be 70 characters or less. You will want to include your target keyword within the character limit as well as enough description to let your reader know what the content is regarding.
- Headings: Not only do subheadings create your content easier for people to read, but it can also help improve your SEO. You can use H1, H2, and H3 tags to help search engines better understand what your content is about.
- Internal Linking: Building internal links, or links to additional articles on your website, helps search engines find out more about your site.
- Image Tags (ALT & Title): If you’re using pictures on your own website or within your site articles, you’ll also want to add your keyword phrase in the picture title and alt tag. This may help search engines better index your own images, which may arise when users perform a picture search for some keyword or phrase.
- Keyword Density: When strategically placing your SEO keywords and phrases on your pages, it is important to make sure you add the keyword the right number of times. Too few can lead to slower ranking and too many can hurt your sites performance. We recommend making the page or article 2% dense.
Pro-Tip: Our favorite tool is SEO Quake. You can download it right to your Chrome browser to easily measure keyword density on-site.
Off-site SEO
Along with on-site SEO variables, there are off-page SEO factors as well. These variables include:
- Backlinks from other websites
- Social Media links
- Local Listing Optimization
- And much more …
These off-page SEO factors can be rather hard to influence. The most important of those off-page factors is the quantity and quality of links pointing towards your website. The greater quality, relevant sites which link to your site, the higher your position in Google will be.
Content, Content, Content
The higher number of quality, relevant and optimized pieces of content that you have on your website, the more inclined search engines will be to rank your content higher on the search engine results page. In the same way, the more engaging and beneficial content you’ve got on your website, the more likely your visitors are to spend some quality time onto your website and possibly even make a purchase.
The key to generating content that is optimized for the search engines and potential customers is to create many different different types of content pieces that are top-notch and on subjects which are most relevant to your audience. And you do not have to limit yourself to just blog posts. There are plenty of content mediums you could try, including:
- E-books
- How to Guides
- Infographics
- Checklists
- And many more …
Another element that can affect your content, and so your search engine positioning, is how fresh your content is. Freshness essentially refers to how often your company places new content to your website. However, creating new content isn’t the only method to keep up with new content. You can also recycle your content by upgrading posts, rewriting them to make them effective, or incorporating new info and data as updated information is found.
Though creating content takes resources and time, it will more than pay off in the long run. Search engines adore great content and customers demand quality content to better understand the value your organization can offer. Start off by creating a couple of blog posts and work to construct a following on social media. As soon as you’ve got a set of brand evangelists and followers, your organization can work to create unique kinds of media to attract and engage new leads.
Are you still wondering, “What Does Search Engine Optimization Mean?”
Search engine optimization is the practice of optimizing sites to make them attain a high position in Google’s — or another search engine’s — search results. An optimized and SEO-friendly website is critical in growing your business online and generating more buzz around your brand. Use the guide above to help rank your site and check our blog for more tips and tricks to help grow your business online.
