The basics of search engine optimization, or SEO, is something that all website owners should know. It is important because it tells you how many people can find your website through the use of keywords and search engines. The more people are able to find you, the better; so what is it that you should know?
What exactly is SEO and why do I need it? SEO is a process focused on organic search engine results. Through SEO, both creative and technical elements are utilized in order to increase traffic, awareness, and improve rankings within the search engine.
What does SEO do for me? When used correctly, SEO can assist in placing your website at the top of the search engine results when people look up your type of products or services. There’s two key components in improving your ranking: ensuring that the keywords to locate your website are on the website itself, and have other quality websites (websites that provide relevant and useful content, while ensuring a good user experience) link directly to your website.
Is SEO something I can do myself, or do I need an expert? While SEO is fairly complex, and can seem rather overwhelming, understanding the basics of how it functions is fairly easy to comprehend. Although, depending on the complexity of your website(s) and the amount of time you can commit to learning about SEO, hiring an expert is possible.
I can’t locate myself on Google; how can I use SEO to get my website out there? When attempting to utilize SEO, the key is to ensure that your most important content is in the right form. While search engines are incredibly smart and accurate the majority of the time, they do need some assistance now and again. Content that does not provide properly formatted text will often be completely ignored, or undervalued by the search engine scan.
The most common place to add content to ensure SEO works at its best include: alt text for images, supplemental search boxes, and meta information. A variety of tools, such as Google’s Cache, can assist you in viewing what elements are visible to the search engine.
Even with the incredible technological advances, search engines are still limited to viewing websites in a different manner than how a human would perceive it. Due to this, search engines rely heavily on meta Information to assist them in understanding how people interact with webpages – essentially giving them insight into the quality and user friendliness of the web page.
