Search engine optimization (SEO) is a marketing approach composed of a number of strategies, and tactics that are commonly used to drive more customers to their website and achieve a higher search engine ranking placement via search engines like Google, Yahoo, or Bing.
SEO can be broken down into two primary components — onsite optimization and offsite optimization.
On site-optimization is often focused on the optimizing the website to create the best user experience when visiting your website. You will need to allow Google search engines to crawl the site and they will determine if your website is optimized for user experience. There are a variety of ways to improve your onsite optimizations.
Common on-site optimizations include:
- Meta tag descriptions
- Header tags
- Creating helpful/relevant content for the user
- Website Accessibility
Meta Tags
Meta Tags<meta> allow visitors to see a snippet of your website’s description before they decide to click on your website. Placing effective meta tag descriptions into your website enables business owners to generate a strong first impression so that it will give customers a good reason to visit their website. You want to make sure the interests of your target audience are strongly aligned with the services that you are providing as a business.
Header Tags
Header tags <h1> allow the users to read your content more easily so that you can summarize the main points of your article into big headers and place the details into smaller headings.
If you want to learn how to place these tags into your website. W3Schools provides useful tutorials on how to use these HTML tags in your website.
Website Content
If you are designing the content for your website, you don’t want to write articles, just for the sake of complaining about your terrible day at work. Keep your readers in mind, and see how you can provide value to them, either through educating them or enriching their positive well-being.
Finally, make sure that the keywords that you want to target are placed sparingly throughout your title tags, meta descriptions, and in your website content.
Website Accessibility
Accessing a website though a small mobile device vs. a huge computer monitor has its stark differences. One of these major differences being that with mobile you are now working with a smaller amount of real estate in terms of screen size. The website should be optimized in manner that enables users to access most of the website functionality, without dealing with tiny text size or cluttered design. Hamburger menus are typically used to solve some of these issues. They allow the user to choose from many options from the hamburger menu, yet they hide complexities of the website to save on screen real estate.
According to studies performed by Digiday, a majority of users are now using mobile devices to access websites. As more and more consumers deal with having busy lives, the aspect of making the website mobile friendly is such a major component that it became one of the major components in the list of Google Algorithms for Google’s search engine placement ranking system.
Just as important as being mobile friendly and device-compatible, it is shown that users wait up to 2 seconds before leaving your website to visit another website. Make sure your website loading speed is lightning quick or you may end up losing a lot of potential sales leads.
Offsite Optimizations
As the title suggests, most offsite SEO strategies are done outside of your website. Offsite Optimizations are SEO strategies that are focused on creating awareness or exposure to your particular brand or company.
Common offsite optimizations include link building and social media.
What Is Link Building?
Link building is the process of finding reputable, well known online communities (blogs, etc.) to link to your website. By having a company or individual with a strong domain in your industry link to your content, you will progressively work towards building your domain authority with Google. One example of a link building strategy is seeking out “resource backlinks”. Often universities or other organizations may provide a directory of recommended services/products that their community may find useful. You can cultivate this relationship and strengthen your link building network by emailing these resource websites and presenting resources or free tools to benefit their audience.
Link building is often a source of controversy among the SEO community, some experts will disagree on the importance of link building because if you have relevant content geared towards your targeted audience, you will naturally have others link to your content.
Social Media Marketing
As google reviews your website, they will often look for social signals on your company and working on getting your brand out there on social media is an important piece of this form of marketing. Depending on your industry or niche, certain social media channels may be more effective than others.
With many social media outlets available, spend some time to evaluate your industry and the best social media channel to find your target audience. By doing this, you can devise a much more solid social media plan so that you aren’t wasting your time and resources.
Conclusion
SEO works in a holistic manner to create not only a better business website to capture more sales leads, but also works to bolster your online presence across the U.S. and internationally. SEO is a vital component of online marketing, as it continues to work as your 24hr sales person as you sleep and also has the potential to scale your business leads exponentially for possibly many years into the future. By being agile and adapting to the changing needs in your market, you can potentially construct a SEO plan that continually feeds water and sunlight into your money making tree.
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