SEO 101: What is SEO & Why Should You Care?
How Will New People Find You?
You’ve heard of SEO, but how can it help you and your business? Basically, search engine optimization (SEO) has to do with how people are able to find you through search engines. If you want to bring in more potential customers organically, building your online content with SEO in mind will help — and it will only improve with time.
How Do Search Engines Work?
To give a simple answer to a complex question, search engines use links to evaluate the relevance and popularity of websites with respect to what keyword or phrase has been entered into the search box. The practice of using SEO when building or updating a website is meant to increase those factors so that you’re more likely to show up in search results – and higher up.
While each search engine has its own algorithms, SEO best practices are pretty similar across the board. More importantly, you should build your websites for users first – and Google agrees.
You'll want to make sure certain keywords are present, but they should be true to the product or service you're offering. People won't stick around if they find you aren’t actually very relevant to what they need.
Heard of Keyword Stuffing? Avoid it.
Back in the early days of SEO, it was common to do what’s called ‘keyword stuffing.’ This is a lot like how it sounds — web designers and content writers would figure out which keywords they wanted to rank for and put them into the website’s content as much as possible. It was very much the motto, “The more it’s in there, the higher we’ll rank!”
These days, keyword stuffing will actually negatively impact how you rank in search results. Instead, it’s better to include the right keywords in a balanced way and focus more on just being informative and accurate about what you offer and what you’re telling visitors.
What Can I Easily Add to Help with SEO?
First of all: understand your audience. This is honestly the most important part of SEO and getting your website seen.
Next, make sure you have plenty of indexable content. The easiest way to jump-start this is by adding what's called alt text to any images you put on your website. With most hosting services, the spot to add this is relatively easy to find – just make sure you use a simple but relevant description for the image.
When you create content for your website, make sure that you have accurate and useful keywords. An important thing to keep in mind with this is to make sure you're using language your target audience will use.
If they search for "cheese shop" but all you have in your keywords are things like "brie," "cheddar," and "parmesan," you still won't show up in their results because you're using different language. Again, it’s important to understand your audience and what they'll be looking for.
Another simple aspect to pay attention to is writing your own website page titles and meta descriptions. Think about when you use a search engine to find a product or service. Some results have a well-worded and cohesive title and description that really tells you what they're all about. Others just have random phrases listed below the title with a lot of ellipsis. That second type is because they didn't write their own, so when the search engine found their website, it simply pulled phrases it found relevant and inserted them. You don't want that.
Once you know who you're marketing to and you've filled your website with relevant content - market your website. Using social media marketing will help your website spread more organically and the increased popularity of your website will bump it up in search results. Encourage people to comment on and share your posts - and the more successful you are with that, the more popular your website will be with search engines, simply because you’re driving more traffic to your website.
The practice of SEO is much more complex than what I've included in this post, but even these few simple aspects can make a difference in the number of people who find your website. And as always, it's a learning process. Technology is constantly changing and so are people's perspectives. Aspects of marketing your website should be regularly refreshed to stay relevant.
