what is SEO
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It can be hard enough keeping up with customer inquiries, payroll and tax filing – but knowing what to do when it comes to SEO? That’s a whole other challenge.

Search engine optimization – more commonly known as SEO – can be a confusing, frustrating and difficult marketing technique for many small business owners to master. And it’s no surprise why. Each year, Google is reported to change its search algorithm approximately 500-600 times, with some of them being major updates that affect SEO methods.

Unless you live, work and breathe SEO, it’s impossible to keep up with the SEO community. But what’s not impossible is having a solid understanding of its foundation. This post should help!

what is seo?

When you created a website for your small business, you did so to boost your business’s bottom line.

SEO helps make that happen.

By optimizing content, the practice of SEO increases the odds that your site ranks on organic search engine results.

Every second on average, Google processes over 40,000 search queries. So if you want to have a chance of your business’s website showing up in a related search, then you need to implement effective SEO techniques. Wondering what that entails?

The world of SEO is vast. There are so many ranking factors involved in optimizing a site for Google that the exact number is unknown (although more than 200 are suspected). Some of them – like mobile-friendliness, crawlability, page speed and content quality – we know about, whereas others are still unknown.

On-page Versus Off-page SEO

Still with me?

To complicate matters even further, search engine optimization includes two different categories: on-page and off-page. Both are needed in an effective search engine optimization strategy.

On-page SEO Factors

On-page SEO determines what you rank for and evaluates what your website is about. It helps search engines understand and index your website so that it can be ranked accordingly. On-page SEO involves factors that you have control over, with some of the biggest ones being:

Title tags

Clickable headlines used on search engine results pages that describe the title of a web page.

headings (h1)

The largest words on a web page, they are typically ranked with more importance than the rest of your copy.

url structure

The creative placement of keywords in a website’s URL can help improve search engine results.

image alt text

Screen reader software uses alt text to make your website more accessible. Like URL structure, image alt text should incorporate relevant keywords to help search engines understand your content.

page load speed

Nobody has time for slow loading websites these days. Google wants users to find what they’re looking for as fast as possible.

page content

A website’s content that’s helpful, relevant and valuable will be ranked higher on search engine results pages.

internal linking

Show Google that your website is full of useful information with internal links to other pages such as this one.

Off-page SEO Factors

Unlike on-page SEO, off-page SEO refers to the ranking factors that do not occur on the website itself.

Viewed as one of the most desired marketing outcomes, link building increases the authority of your domain and affects your search engine results. The success of this off-page SEO technique depends on how valuable other websites view your own website’s content and how many times they link back to your site.

Natural link building occurs when someone links to your business’s website as a sign of endorsement. Other ways of increasing a website’s backlinks are by generating social media shares through guest blogging opportunities and posting in forums such as Quora, Reddit or Yahoo Answers.

Important SEO Tips to Keep in Mind

Hopefully by now, you’re wondering what you should be doing to implement an effective SEO strategy. Although we have plenty of tips that we offer through our comprehensive SEO services, one of the biggest ones involves creating valuable blog and web content.

Without having interesting, relevant content on your website that search engine users are looking for, then you’ll have a difficult time ranking in the first place. Google is there to help users find answers to their queries and rewards websites that have helpful content with higher rankings. The user experience is enhanced, industry authority increases and off-page SEO is also positively affected.

Both on-page and off-page SEO are necessary for an effective marketing strategy, which is why we offer both types of packages. To learn more about what SEO is and the importance it plays in the search engine results page, contact us today.