What is SEO and why should I care?
Whether you run a brick and mortar store or operate an online business, you probably want more traffic. Visitors will hopefully turn into more customers giving you more sales. While having a website is a smart move, there are other factors that affect your ranking on search engines. One of the factors is content. Your website uses webpages for each products and services that you offer.
If you’re looking to build your online presence and generate more leads, then you’re probably thinking about optimizing your website. But before you dive into those technical SEO guidelines, it can be helpful to have a full understanding of how search engines work and the process they use to determine rankings. If you’re a small business owner or in charge of marketing, this post will be especially helpful.
What is search engine traffic and how do I get it to my website?
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the practice of strategically improving your website’s visibility in search engines. It’s important to understand that SEO is not a set-it-and-forget-it technique. You will continuously need to update and optimize your website for the best results. Here are the basics of SEO for small business owners.
What is search engine traffic?
Search engine traffic, or SEO, is the name of the game on the internet. The higher your website ranks in search results, the more traffic you will get. This leads to more sales and more profits for your business.
Search engine traffic is a type of organic web traffic that comes from search engines, such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing. This includes both paid and unpaid results; paid results include sponsored links along with natural search results based on popular keyword searches, while unpaid results include both non-paid listings (also called natural listings) and organic search results that appear in the unpaid, or “natural,” listings area of the search engine results page (SERP).
How do I get search engine traffic to my website?
In order to get this traffic to your site in the first place, you need to create an online profile for your site by using keywords that describe your business and what you have to offer. The more relevant these keywords are to the content on your site, they higher up you’ll be on the SERPs.
Your marketing efforts may also help drive traffic from search engines, such as Adwords, Bing or Yahoo. These services allow you to place ads alongside relevant search results, giving you an opportunity to be noticed if someone searches for something related to your business. You can also use search engine optimization (SEO) techniques to help you rank higher in the results of a keyword search. This involves making sure all the text on your website is meaningful and relevant to the topic of your business and that it includes important keywords related to your business.
Tips:
- Start with your website
- Optimize your on-page SEO
- Create high quality content
- Use Social Media
- Submit your site to directories
What are on-page seo and off-page seo?
Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the process of optimizing websites for better rankings in search engine results pages (SERPs). This means using keywords to obtain a higher ranking for specific terms. It is a popular method of generating traffic from SERPs.
The most important thing is to make your website as user-friendly as possible. Good on-page SEO means that you create a site that people want to visit and that search engines like Google will want to rank highly. You are not trying to trick Google into ranking your site higher—you are simply trying to offer relevant content that users want to find.
On-Page SEO
On-page SEO is the practice of optimizing page titles, page headings and meta descriptions and keyword usage. These elements must be included in every page that you wish to rank well on Google.
Off-Page SEO
Off-page SEO relates to getting other sites—forums, social networking sites, and so on—to link back to your site. The more links you have, the higher you will rank on Google. There are also other factors, such as building quality backlinks and establishing authority within Google’s algorithm.
How can I optimize my content for search engines?
If you want to succeed online, SEO is essential. Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving your website’s visibility in search engines so that more people will find and visit your site.
The goal of SEO is not to trick search engines into giving your website a high rank. You want to make sure the search engines can see and understand your content. The best way to do this is to write naturally for humans, using words that people use in everyday language. Write for your audience, not the search engine robots.
To optimize your content for search engines, remember these basic rules:
1. Use keywords correctly. Don’t stuff keywords into your content just to manipulate search engines; use them correctly and naturally in sentences and paragraphs. Keywords are only one part of SEO; don’t forget about grammar, spelling, and style when writing for an audience.
2. Provide good links. Search engines evaluate websites by looking at the links that point to those websites. Websites that have lots of good incoming links have higher rankings than sites with few or no incoming links because they are seen as having more value or importance when compared with sites with fewer incoming links.
3. Use Keywords in Your Title Tag and URL Your title tag is a snippet of code found in the header of your webpages and can influence how often they’re found in search results. Therefore when creating a title tag it’s important to include relevant keywords which will help your page show up in search results. Your title tag should also be descriptive enough so that people can quickly understand what your page is about.
How can I track my search engine ranking?
Tracking your search engine ranking is important for many reasons. First, it gives you a way to gauge your marketing efforts. If you have a good idea of how well you’re doing in the search engines, you can make changes that will improve your ranking and help increase traffic to your site.
Trying different things in your SEO strategy to see which ones work can also be a lot of fun, but only if you can actually tell whether something is working or not.
So here’s a list of some of the most useful and affordable tools available today to help you track your search engine ranking:
Ahrefs is a powerful tool for tracking your search engine ranking. It includes a suite of features that allow you to see which keywords are bringing traffic to your site, how much traffic each keyword is driving and how you can optimize for it even further.
SEO Powersuite by link assistant is a fantastic tool for checking your site’s total link juice and backlinks, track your rankings and even spy on your competition. These are very important factors in whether or not Google will rank your page highly or not!
Buzzsumo is another good tool that allows you to quickly find popular content on the web related to any topic. You can use this information to create more content like what’s already out there so that Google ranks it higher in their search engine.
Conclusion
Think SEO is a field that’s only for large companies with lots of resources? Think again. There are many easy ways to optimize your website to get it discovered by more people who are actively searching online. Your business website will be found by new customers regardless of its size, as long as you make sure that search engines can find and index it.
Hopefully we’ve covered enough material here to shed some light on the ins and outs of SEO. If you’re an SEO novice, this resource should prove useful in learning more about how small businesses can maximize their rankings on search engines. And if you happen to be an SEO expert looking for even more tips, be sure to check out the resources section below for additional blogs and other online articles.
If you’re struggling to get your website found by your target customers, it’s time to lean on your friendly neighborhood search engine optimization expert!
