Understanding SEO

- When done effectively, SEO, or search engine optimization, will help your potential website visitors to find you when they perform relevant searches on the search engines. It's important to remember that SEO is a marathon and not a sprint. It, therefore, requires a long-term strategy. There's no magic bullet that's going to all of a sudden have you ranking in Google for the types of keywords that you desire. You have to be doing the right types of things consistently over time and build out your website's authority to prove to the search engines that you deserve to be ranking where you think you want to be ranking. So, what are some of the benefits to SEO? Firstly, Google is the largest search engine in the world. Google accounts for roughly 40% of the entire internet's traffic. If your website is not showing up on Google, then you're potentially missing out on massive amounts of visitors back to your site. SEO is free traffic. This means you don't have to go out of pocket with your marketing strategy trying to pay for visitors back to your site. SEO is one of those methods which is absolutely free. SEO traffic tends to convert very well. Think about it, when people use the search engines, they normally know what they are looking for. If they stumble across your website in the search results, then they're more likely to take a specific action, whether that be to buy your product or to sign up for your list. SEO traffic converts a lot better than Facebook traffic, where you're paying for traffic and interrupting what that person initially intended to do on Facebook. So, what should you focus on when it comes to SEO? The answer to that is building authority, and you can do that with these four key elements. The first key element is usability. You need to make sure that it's intuitive when someone comes to your website. Your website should be extremely user-friendly. Your website should be structured in a way that makes people feel like they can find and access your content easily. Your website should also load really quickly. If it takes too long for your website to load, then people are likely to bounce off of your website and find an alternative site. This is negative for your search engine optimization. Usability is key. Make your website as user-friendly as possible. Also, content. Content is super important with regards to SEO. You don't only want to have initially great content on your website, but you want to be constantly updating your website with really useful and engaging content. When someone comes to your site, there should be loads of content for them to consume. Social media is also a key to your search engine optimization. You want to make sure that your brand is being active on social media. Don't just create an account, but actually contribute there. Produce really great content, not just on your website, but also on social media and drive people back to your site. Get in links to your website. Links is really important. If other websites are linking back to you, then that is a great signal for your SEO. Other websites need to be linking back to your site. A great way to do this, again, is by producing really quality content. If you're producing quality content on your site, that gives other websites a reason to link back to you. These links are vital to your SEO. These four principles should be applied to your website and they all interlink into one thing, and that is building your overall website's domain authority. The higher of a domain authority that your website has, the greater chance you have of ranking in search results. So, what exactly is domain authority? It's a website that provides value consistently over time. The search engines need to make sure that your website is valuable. They don't want to show websites in their search results that provide their users with no value. If you can prove to the search engines that your site is valuable by producing quality and valuable content on a consistent basis, then you're proving to them that your site deserves to be ranked for the keywords that you want to rank for. An authoritative website is also a website that other sites want to link back to for reference and accreditation. As we've mentioned, you can get other sites to link back to you by creating quality content, but you can also create guest articles on other websites and link back to your site in the Author Bio section. When you're gaining links like this to your website, this proves to the search engines that your website must be authoritative. In turn, your website needs to be user-friendly, you need to make sure that your SEO strategy is long-term, and you need to make use of social media as a way to build out your entire website's authority. If you follow these principles, you're giving your website the best possible chance to perform well in search engines.