What is SEO and is it important?
2017-11-17
In this blog, we will be talking about vital role SEO should be playing in your business. Regardless of the size of your business or the industry that you’re in, SEO should be a fundamental part of your marketing strategy.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) refers to an online marketing method which will improve a website’s ranking on search engines such as Google. A successful SEO strategy could see a struggling business begin to compete with the best of them. However, in order to design a successful strategy, you need to understand how the search engines use metrics to rank the websites.
A search engine is designed to offer unbiased results to searches and deliver the information as quickly and as efficiently as possible. Search engines are capable of identifying all aspects of appropriate information online and rank this in order of quality and relevance. Each search engine can analyze billions of pieces of data in just 0.5 seconds – unbelievable! The strategy you put in place will directly affect your SEO ranking. Tags, keywords and links should all be part of your marketing campaign.
Below is a list of tactics that are vital to every successful SEO campaign and how Google will use the information.
Keyword Density:
Every time someone searches on Google, they use words that are triggers for Google. How people search and the words they use is key to your success. Keyword density is the amount of times that a specific keyword appears on your website – in tags and main content. However, while the temptation may be to overload your content with popular keywords, this is actually one of the worst things you can do as Google has new algorithms to fish out people doing just this and if you are found to be cheating the system, you will lose your place altogether. Google is looking for fresh, regularly updated content that is relevant to searches.
Header Tags:
These are longer headings that you should be using for all of your content. Every time you load content onto your website, you need to fill out the SEO information below the main content box. In it will be an option for header tags (also known as H1 Tags). Blogs for example could have use the blog title as the tag while web pages should use the most emphasized text on the page. Essentially, it should be the largest text that stands out. The one things that is vital for every tag is to have the best keywords included, but for the title to still make sense.
Meta Description:
This is the description you need to provide Google with for your website. It is very important to think carefully about it as it will be seen by the public. It should include your targeted keywords and also needs to make sense.
Permalinks:
These are your very own links unique to your website. It is advisable to include keywords in this link so that they rate higher on Google. Whatever your website domain, the permalinks should be followed by ‘/keyword’.
Backlinks:
This is the mutual linking of sites and specifically when a website links back to yours by providing their visitors with your website address (URL). The higher that particular website ranks on Google, the more valuable the link. Once again, Google has got wise to the tricks and buying backlinks from websites is not recommended at all.
Other points to consider
Is your website mobile friendly?
Technology is advancing at such a rapid speed, it can be difficult to keep up. Not everything that changes will affect you, but there are some aspects that you need to make sure you’re up-to-date with. For example, a vast majority of people view websites on their mobile phone or tablet. You need to make sure your website is mobile ready otherwise you could lose many potential clients.
Search engines consistently change their algorithms to keep up, and with the rise of mobile traffic, a new addition to their ranking metrics is whether or not sites are optimized for mobile devices. If your site is not mobile friendly, you will find yourself slipping down the search rankings when people search from such devices. This is definitely something to consider if your target market is more likely to search from mobiles or tablets.
What are paid rankings?
If you have some money to spend, it may well be worthwhile to include a budget for paid rankings. Google Ads will almost certainly help you attain that top spot and of course, Google favors those sites who pay! However, even sites using paid adds get ranked and so it is still important to include the SEO techniques mentioned above. The better position you find yourself in, the cheaper your add could become. However it is also worth being aware that certain keywords are more expensive than others.
Ultimately, your SEO strategy should always be planned for the long term. Getting on that much sought after first page of Google will never happen overnight and it is a continuous process that will need to be tweaked and nurtured as you go along. You need to stay up-to-date with SEO techniques and monitor your site using Google analytics to see how you fare compare to your competitors. If you find yourself always losing out to the same company, have a look at what they do and make it your policy to do the same, but bigger and better.