SEO is a term that is used everywhere with marketing agencies but barely anyone knows what it means. So what is SEO, what are some big-name companies that use SEO and how do you implement it to boost your business?
SEO: The Absolute Meaning
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a process used by professionals around the world in order to boost traffic and brand awareness for their businesses page. SEO can be applied to any platform with an engine that is used for searching pages, profiles, or businesses.
SEO is the practice of optimizing your page to rank higher in the search results. This can be done in many different ways but the popular approach is to take the content which is already on the pages of your site and improve it by including keywords related to the business so when potential customers are searching for your product or service they will come across you before other businesses in the same field as you are in.
This doesn’t mean it is ok to repeat keywords without meaning as this makes you vulnerable to penalization. It is important to balance user experience and keywords in your site so you get great results from both Google and any human viewing your site.
This is important as it means that you will yield higher traffic to your page from people interested in your service compared to rivals, overall increasing brand recognition for your business and helping you grow.
SEO is not that straightforward though, there are multiple types of SEO and there are more strategies that you can use in which we are going to cover in this guide.
The different types of SEO
As stated in the previous section there are multiple different aspects to SEO and in this section, we will cover the different types of SEO and what they include.
On-Page SEO
This focuses on optimizing the content that is on the page and is usually consists of adding keywords to content and making your content more readable and consistent.
On-Page optimization is brilliant for you as it tells the search engine all about your page and the way you provide value to eligible traffic. It is great for making your page appealing to both people and search engine crawler bots.
On-page optimization has this name because the changes that you make to your page are seen by customers without the need for tools or additional software.
All of this type of optimization is done by a person so it is vital that it is done properly. Because of this fact, a lot of people decide it is better to go to a professional for this. Our daughter company (Be My Social) offers affordable SEO services for your needs.
Some On-Page elements include High-quality Content, Page Titles, Headers, Alt Text, Structured Markup, Page URLs, Internal Linking, Mobile Responsiveness, and Site Speed.
Off-Page SEO
This type of optimization focuses on backlinks. Backlinks are links that are directed to your page from other sources. For example, if your page gets linked to a separate, high-traffic company then your page will be preferred by the algorithm thus ranking you higher. Off-page Optimization focuses on trust and the number of backlinks a page has from a reputable source directly correlates with trust with search engines.
Technical SEO
This type of optimization refers to anything you do which makes your page easier for a search engine to crawl and index. Technical SEO, content strategy, and link-build all work in synchrony in order to assist your pages to rank higher in a search engine.
Technical SEO comprises multiple different factors of which I’m about to cover and usually applies to engines used to find websites such as Google. Here are some tips to Improve your Technical SEO.
- SSL
SSL is used to create an encrypted link between a web server and a browser. You can usually spot a sit that uses SSL quite easily. This is done by looking at the URL. If a URL starts with https:// which is differential to http:// then the site uses SSL technology. Google declared that they wanted to see “HTTPS everywhere” back in 2014, This means if you don’t use SSL to secure your website then you are likely not going to be ranked in its search engine. Because of this, you should definitely install an SSL certificate on your website.
- Mobile Friendliness
A responsive website design can adjust itself so it can be viewed on any device and its content can be read easily. Google has made it obvious that having a responsive website is a significant ranking factor for its algorithm. The introduction of Google’s “mobile-first” algorithm means it is more important than ever to make sure that your site is viewable on mobile devices.
- Speedy Sites
A massive factor to how high you are ranked on a search engine is how fast your page can load. If you have a page that loads faster than a rival’s then you are likely going to get ranked higher than them. Some ways of speeding up your site are using fast hosting, using a fast DNS, minimizing plugins and scripts, using one CSS stylesheet, and more.
- Duplicate Content
Duplicate Content can be very damaging for your website, not just for users but for algorithms too. If content duplication is that much of an issue then you can get penalized for it.
- Create XML sitemap
An XML sitemap is a file that assists search engines to understand how your website is set out. You could think of it as a map of sorts, telling your search engine where your pages are and what pages you have.
- Enable AMP
AMP is a Google-backed project that tries to speed up the delivery of content on mobile devices through code called AMP HTML.
AMP versions of your site load extremely fast on mobile devices. They do this by stripping your content and code to the bare bones. Leaving text, images, and video but disabling scripts, comments, and forms.