In previous SEO article, we’ve talked about what SEO is and addressed its importance in digital marketing. However, this time we’ll explore the general terms about what it is and its usefulness in a more basic way.
Search engine optimization or organic positioning is more important today than ever, and it should be a priority that all companies, who want to be discovered online, understand its true worth and the growth potential it offers in today’s digital businesses.
In addition, it is a great way to increase the quality of your websites by making them faster, secure, and easier to navigate things and therefore resulting in a better user experience.
SEO can also be considered as a website development framework as the whole process has a series of rules or guidelines, a series of stages, and a set of controls.
What is SEO? Definition
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and refers to all the strategies that are proposed to optimize the content on the web for search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, Bing, Baidu, Yandex and other search engines. In digital marketing, it is a smart way to increase your online visibility, attract new customers, grow your business, and increase revenue.
The optimizations are intended to allow search engines through their algorithm to consider the content, value them and give them a position in the search results. Of course, the best achievement will be to appear in the first position or at least on the first search page. It is one of the best to get organic traffic from Google and other search engines.
While in definition optimization focuses on search engines, the priority of those in the field is the user over the machine, since ultimately they are the ones who use the search engines.
SEO for Beginners:
For SEO beginners, maybe the above definition may sound complicated, so in simple words, we can say that it is a way to appear in the first search results or at least on the first page of Google.
For example, when you search on Google, the order in which the results are displayed is based on complex algorithms in the background.
These algorithms take into account a number of factors to decide which web page should be displayed first, second, third, etc.
SEO will give your website/blog an edge over non-optimized sites and will increase your chances of ranking higher. Search engine optimization helps bring such valuable content to the right users.
What is Organic Traffic?
This type of traffic refers to the person or persons who are conducting a search through search engines and clicking on a result that is not an advertisement.
According to a study by The RAIN Group, in 2009 and published in 2010 by HubSpot, the website influences 97% of purchase decisions of customers. The advantage that exists today is that social networks also help us to get our prospects to our website or to search for us directly on our profiles through Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, etc. which is known as Social Search.
What is Direct Traffic?
This type of traffic is directly related to a metric called “brand awareness, which has a direct impact on sales. Brand awareness tells us how well recognized a certain brand is by consumers.
Direct traffic consists of the number of visitors that come to your website by directly typing the URL of your website in their search engines instead of coming from another website, a search engine result or social networks.
We must think more like SEO Search Experience Optimization or Optimization of the search experience as it is a crucial part of our strategy as a brand, has a direct impact on sales and makes us a reliable source of information for our prospects.
Why SEO is Important in Marketing?
In today’s competitive market, SEO is more important than ever before. Most online users are more likely to click on one of the top 1-5 suggestions on the results pages (SERPs). In order for you to take advantage of this and get more traffic to your website, or customers in your online store, you must always have content in the first 5 positions or at least on the first page.
SEO is not just about search engines, but about improving user experience and website usability.
Search engines like Google are the most used search engine to search for information and it is the key for e-commerce. For this reason that it is key to have a good web positioning since being on the first page of results increases the probability of obtaining a visit.
SEO is an integral part of inbound strategies that essentially seek to attract and mature potential customers.
What SEO tactics are there?
Search engines like Google and others change their algorithms from time to time to bring advancement in user experience and to strengthen their security. There are many tactics involved to get a position in search rankings. We can divide them into On-page, Off-page and technical SEO strategies. All three SEO factors are equally important to rank your content in search results. Here’re some of the benefits of SEO for a Website.
On-Page SEO:
On-Page SEO is associated with the content of your website, to understand if internet search engines understand your content and if your page is a source of relevant information for people who are looking for those topics. You should conduct a study of keywords within your page and add “inbound links” or inbound links.
You can use the Keyword Difficulty Tool to understand what keywords you can include on your site that are not very competitive and that are relevant and you can also use the On-Page SEO Checker, to review each of your pages within your website. You might also be interested in the 10 most common On-Page SEO Issues.
As its name indicates, they are the optimizations we carry out in the content such as including and consistently repeating the key phrase, improvement of HTML tags (site titles, Meta descriptions and Headings), images, schema markup, inbound and outbound links, among others.
These optimizations are essential for search engines through their bots to interpret the information on the page, relate it to a search term and give it a position in searches.
Something key in these optimization tactics, even above including the search term in the texts, is that the content must be of quality, well written and relevant to the user. Remember that we do not publish websites for robots, but for people. Here’re are the 10 Essential On-Page SEO Factors to Rank your Website in Google.
Off-page SEO:
Off-page SEO refers to all kinds of techniques that occur outside the website and that are not always in our full control. The link-building strategy mainly comes in here, that is, our website is referenced by others by adding links pointing out our content and recommendation for Google and as well as for the audience.
Off-Page SEO is the most complex of all, it helps to strengthen the influence and relationship that your website has with other sites. It includes the strategies and techniques that should be used to build the reputation and authority of a site, these factors help search engines to know which website should be an ideal result for when someone is performing a certain search since it comes from a reliable source.
Most of the actions that increase off-site SEO are related to high-quality backlinks. A high volume of links pointing to your site from other authoritative websites helps your site become a valuable and relevant page. For this to happen you must have an inbound link-building strategy and a plan to invite recognized people to write on your site or invite them to point to some content on your page.
Link from Higher Domain Authority:
This type of practice is done to improve our reputation in search engines and it works as long as the websites that refer to us are not penalized by Google and have a good rank. A link from any higher DA (Domain Authority) site is more important than 10’s of links from low DA sites. This strategy is called “Backlinks” and still has its unique importance to get ranked and discovered by Google and other search engines. In the upcoming articles, we will discuss different techniques to get links from higher DA sites.
Other strategies are also taken into account, such as socializing links on social networks and using content aggregators that have a good reputation.
It is of key importance that the strategies are honest, seeking to create relationships with other websites and generating alliances, avoiding being linked to quality websites and publishing our links with strategy and not generating spam. It is also important to avoid toxic links, so it is necessary to analyze from time to time which websites are linking to us. Here’re the 5 Plagiarism Checkers for Medical and Scientific Articles.
Technical SEO:
Technical SEO, is related to all the elements that are not contained within your website. Here we go into aspects a little deeper, since it has to do with the structure of the backend the site has.
The Technical SEO, helps the complete reading of it by the search engines so that they can understand the site and its architecture, it also helps to provide a good experience for the user who navigates within our website and this also tells you to the search engines that our site is of quality. If you want to know how well or badly you have done this job on your page, you can go to SEO Audit Tool and review it to know what actions to take.
This type of SEO is focused more on the structure of our website, such as having a good design and user experience, good loading speed, the implementation of AMP (accelerated mobile pages), broken links, and metadata, among others.
What is Local SEO?
Local SEO is one that is focused on improving the web positioning of a specific geographic area. In this case, it is common to use long-tail key phrases, which are those that become very specific and usually have few searches.
An example of local SEO with long-tail keyword phrases would be working with “Best restaurants in Karachi” or “Top Gym centers in Lahore”.
Another way to work in local SEO is to make use of maps (geographical locations). In the case of Google, it is common for us to use Google My Business to improve our positioning on Maps. Here’s a complete article to fully understand what local SEO is!
What is international SEO?
International SEO is one that focuses on impacting searches from different countries. This is worked using “hreflang tags”, adapting content to the different audiences and languages we want to reach, among other technical optimizations, off-page and on-page SEO.
How to measure if my SEO strategy works?
The seemingly easiest way is to do a search with the key phrases you have worked on and check which page of the results your website is on. However, it may happen that if you have not entered the first hundred results, it is more difficult for you to know in which position to be.
If you want to be more certain, use the Google Search Console tool, which will give you information about the positioning by search terms, will show you related statistics, and will alert you to some technical errors.
Another option is to use external tools such as Moz or Semrush, which have constant monitoring of the SEO of your website.
I also recommend using tools to check the loading speed of your website like Google Page Insights, GTMetrix, or on Schema markup like Google’s Rich Results.
Without SEO, your strategy is incomplete:
Now that you are clear about SEO, its importance and some basic concepts, you are clear that this is an essential part of an Inbound strategy. And it is especially key to attract and mature potential customers, which correspond to the upper and middle parts of the conversion funnel.
That is why it is important for your objectives to constantly invest in SEO, analyze the results and improve your content from time to time to be one step ahead of the competition.
Did you now understand what SEO is?
To become an SEO expert and handle the key things of your website, I recommend you visit other articles related to the subject that you can find on my blog.
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