Understand the POWER of SEOUnderstand the POWER of SEO
Sometimes, all it takes are three little letters to scare you. Say the IRS and the people are strong. Is the FBI outside your door? Yes, this is not good news. And when it comes to websites, SEO is often seen as the big bad wolf.
SEO, or search engine optimization, is one of the most misunderstood, but most important digital marketing topics. There is a misconception that harnessing the power of SEO is quick and easy. It’s not true! SEO is a process that takes time to show results. It may take months to see results.
What is SEO?
So let’s break it down. SEO is a systematic process to improve organic (or unpaid) rankings in internet searches. SEO is sometimes referred to as organic search, organic search, or natural search. Whatever you call it, it all depends on where your website appears in the search results list when someone searches for your product or service.
This position is very close to the top of the analysis with many advantages. When your page rank increases, you improve your visibility – in other words, people can find you. Finding it leads to increased traffic to your website and increased brand awareness. On the other hand, when people can’t find you, you lose all traffic, potential leads, and sales.
How do search engines find you in the first place?
The quality of your page depends on how well your brand/business matches what the user is looking for. Search engines like Google and Yahoo “crawl” or crawl websites to display information that matches a user’s search. The better the game, the higher the page rank. The key to getting high search results is to make sure your site has everything the search engines are looking for.
How to improve your search engine ranking
Here are some helpful guidelines:
Viewable
Make sure your site can be viewed on all devices: phones, tablets, and laptops. Your site must be well designed, responsive and user-friendly. Site speed and loading time can also affect SEO techniques. So, make sure your site loads fast and works well.
Secure
Your site should start with https, especially if you need sensitive information or have e-commerce services.
Content
Write content that people find useful. Useful content is shared, spreading your content on Twitter, blogs and other social media. Quality is more important than quantity of content. Make sure your content includes keywords or phrases that reflect what you do and how people are looking for you.
Images
Search engines crawl your photos on your website. Make sure all your images have “Alt Text” and an appropriate image file name. For example, “red convertible car” is better than “image_13”.
Security
Add a unique meta title and description for each page on your site. Think of meta titles like chapters in a book – they summarize the content of each page. For example, “pizza delivery zone” is better than “page3b”. Also, make sure your URL structure is user-friendly. For example, “/blog/tips-for-SEO” vs. “/blog/article54.”
Links
Add inbound links to your site. When a page links to another page, it usually tells search engines that the site contains valuable information. Be careful, only send people to trusted sites and make sure everyone who links to you is also trustworthy.
Don’t fear SEO
These are a few guidelines when you think about SEO. Yes, SEO is a long and tedious process, but it is very important and should be an important part of your marketing strategy. If you’re looking for immediate results, consider paid marketing campaigns, but don’t overlook SEO and its powerful impact.