If you have a website and want it to be seen by new audiences, then performing proper Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques will help it appear in relevant non-paid results.
Maybe you already have a blog or website that gets a lot of traffic everyday thanks to paid advertising, social media efforts or other online platforms. This is a great start!
However, knowing how to properly optimize your posts or pages, can help them appear in the Search Engines Results Page (SERP) for non-paid results.
Additionally, performing proper optimization requires technical skills that you can do yourself or hire a professional to do so. Whichever solution you choose, it will be a good long term investment.
Let’s take a look at some basic concepts on SEO!
What is SEO and Why You Need it for Your Website?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, which is the practice of optimizing a website to make it appear in a search engine’s (such as Google, Bing or Duckduckgo) organic (non paid) search results.
Because while paid advertising, social media or other platforms can bring traffic to your website, the majority of online traffic is driven by search engines.
“In a nutshell, SEO is one of the the only online marketing channels that when set up correctly, can continue to pay dividends over time. Whereas, advertising needs continuous funding to send traffic to your website.” Moz.com
Search engines like Google, go around the Internet 24/7 and read (or crawl) every content they find, saving an HTML version of it in their database (called “the index”). From the moment your site is in Google’s index, it can appear in its search results.
In other words, Google reads what it’s available, adds it to its database and sorts it according to the relevance to search queries.
As for the order in which a site appears, Google has an algorithm that decides what pages will be shown. Although this algorithm is a secret, there are some on and off factors that help a site rank in a high position on the Search Results Page (SERP).
Here’s a good read on the topic:
The Ultimate Guide to Google Ranking Factors in 2019
Depending on your budget, time, willingness to learn and complexity of your website, you could:
A) Perform SEO basics yourself. There are a lot of online resources to start learning this technique at your own pace. There are free resources like the MOZ blog, that I strongly recommend, and from where I’ve got my knowledge in the topic. For instance visit their “The Begginer’s Guide to SEO” and keep it for your future reference.
B) Hire an SEO professional, consultant or agency. If decide to take this option, I’d recommend you to first make a research on the best options available. Keep in mind that the wrong SEO could actually hurt your website more than it would help.
Essential SEO Reads
Also, you can add to your personal library the following book references:
- SEO for Dummies by Peter Kent, which will give you a quick and practical understanding of this technique.
2. The Art of SEO, Mastering Search Engine Optimization by E. Enge, S. Spencer, and J. C. Stricchiola (O’Reilly). This book will give you a solid knowledge on this tehcnique.
Create useful content for humans
Start off by creating high quality content on your blog that responds to people’s questions, and find out how people are asking them. Then perform proper search engine optimization to let search engines know you’re providing the right answers to your audience’s questions.
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How to create effective blog posts on WordPress.
Why a Website is Important for your Small Business Growth
Conclusion
To sum up, whether you decide to learn this technique or to hire a professional to perform SEO on your website, keep in mind that when done well, it will help your brand achieve real goals for your success.
Thank you for reading!
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