What is SEO?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a digital marketing strategy that helps to improve a website’s visibility on free organic search engine result pages like Google, Bing, and others. SEO can also help to increase website traffic by making it easier for search engines to crawl and index your content, as well as ensuring that the right content is being shown to users.
Why is SEO Important?
SEO is important because it helps you to increase your website’s visibility, drive organic traffic, and build credibility and trust with your audience.
- Increase Website Visibility: SEO helps you to rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs). This means that more people will find your content when they search for keywords related to what you offer.
- Drive Organic Traffic: When someone searches for something on Google or Bing, they are presented with a list of websites that match their query based on how well they’ve been optimized for that particular keyword or phrase. If yours ranks highly enough among those results then people will click through from there onto your site–and hopefully stay long enough to become customers!
- Build Credibility & Trust With Your Audience: The more visible a website becomes in SERPs, the more likely it is that visitors will trust its information as being reputable and accurate; this can lead them down a path towards conversion (i.e., making purchases).
On-Page SEO
On-page SEO is the practice of optimizing your website pages to rank highly in search engines. Some of the basics include; relevant keywords in page titles, unique meta descriptions, user friendly URLs, and more.
The next step is writing in-depth keyword relevant content for each page of your site. This will help Google understand what the topic of each page is, so that when someone searches for those words or phrases, they’ll find your web page.
You also need to optimize images with alt tags and other elements so that they can be found by people who use screen readers (like visually impaired users).
Off-Page SEO
Off-page SEO is the process of building links to your website. Link building is one of the most important aspects of search engine optimization, and it can be done in a variety of ways:
- Link building through social media marketing (SMM)
- Link building through content marketing
- Reclaiming lost links
- Redirecting lost & broken links
- Outreach and digital PR
Tools for SEO
- Google Search Console: Google’s webmaster tools is a suite of tools that helps you to optimize your site for search engines. You can use it to track how well your content is ranking in search results, as well as diagnose problems with crawling and indexing issues.
- Google Analytics: This tool provides insights into how visitors are interacting with your site, including where they come from (e.g., social media), what pages they visit most often and how long they stay on the site before leaving or converting. It also gives insight into which keywords people are using when searching for products or services like yours so that you can optimize them accordingly.
- Keyword research tools: There are many different keyword research tools out there. They provide both broad-level suggestions as well as more granular options based on specific phrases related to what you’re looking for (e.g., “how do you find home repair services?”).
SEO Best Practices
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving your website’s visibility in search engines. You can do this by creating content that is relevant to your users, not just search engines. You should focus on quality over quantity when it comes to creating new content. It’s also important that you update your site regularly so people will keep coming back for more information as they need it.
SEO Trends
- Voice search optimization: With the rise of voice-activated devices and apps, SEO experts are looking at how to optimize content for this new way of searching.
- Mobile-first indexing: Google announced that it will be moving toward a mobile-first indexing strategy, meaning that websites with better mobile usability will have an advantage over those that don’t.
- Featured snippets: Featured snippets are the box at the top of your SERP that shows an answer to a user’s query in a block of bold text–and they’re becoming more important than ever as Google continues to improve its ability to provide answers directly in search results.
Common SEO Mistakes
Now that you’ve got the basics down, let’s look at some common mistakes people make when trying to optimize their websites.
- Not researching keywords: Keywords are words or phrases that people use when searching for something on the internet. If you want your website to show up in search results for these terms, then it’s important that you choose them wisely! You should also make sure that each page of your site includes those keywords in its title tag, meta description and content (if possible). This will help Google know what each page is about so they can better serve users who land there.
- Duplicate content: Duplicate content occurs when two web pages have similar information but aren’t quite identical copies of each other; this can cause problems with Google ranking algorithms because they only rank one version as “unique” while penalizing both versions due to perceived plagiarism issues.
- Not optimizing for mobile devices: Mobile optimization refers specifically toward making sure sites are easily readable by smartphones and tablets–this includes everything from responsive design layouts all the way down through smaller font sizes on mobile screens
Long Term Process
SEO is a long-term process, so don’t expect immediate results. It’s important to remember that SEO should be part of an overall marketing strategy and not the only thing you do. If your website has poor quality content or isn’t optimized for mobile devices, it won’t rank well in search engines regardless of how much effort you put into optimizing it via keywords and meta descriptions.
In order for your site to rank well in Google’s search results pages (SERPs), it needs to be authoritative–meaning that other sites link back to yours and recognize its authority within its field of expertise–and relevant–meaning that Google knows what kind of information users are looking for when they search on certain keywords or phrases related specifically with those topics within their industry niche community space.