SEO Explained: What is SEO and how does it work

What is SEO? How does SEO work? Why it is important for your website and your business? There are many ways to market your brand or business. However, capitalizing on SEO is one of the best ways to get more leads and sales. It helps you to be easily found on search engines like Google. In this article, I will break down for you everything. We are going to see what SEO really means, how it works and why it is important. We will look at how you can leverage content writing, on-page SEO, and off-page SEO to improve your rankings.

What is SEO?

Firstly, What is SEO? How does it work? SEO which stands for Search Engine Optimization is a digital marketing strategy that focuses on optimizing your website’s presence on search engines like Google. The main aim of SEO is to acquire targeted traffic. In other words, SEO is the process of making your website attractive to search engine queries by users (SEO-friendly).

If your website is not showing on google results, one of the reasons is that it is not SEO optimized. Other reasons could be found here

How does it Work?

Search engines deliver search results that are only relevant to what the user is looking for. This is done by ‘crawling’ through the website to better understand what the website is about. Moreover, Search engines use ‘spiders’ to collect all kinds of information about your website including the pages. This enables them to easily determine whether to serve a user with a page on your website. They check the page speed, title tags, social signals, internal linking, backlinks, and so on.  Crawling also helps it deliver results that are as relevant as possible to certain topics or keywords.

Courtesy: wavemakers.co

Why SEO is important

1. Visibility – SEO is important because it provides your website with the visibility it requires to attract your target audience. The higher you rank, the more traffic and clicks you get.
2. Trust and Credibility – Users trust search engines, and therefore, being highly ranked tells the users that your site is a credible source.
3. Helps you understand your audience – SEO will help you understand your audience’s needs. You will be able to analyze their search patterns and adjust your site to meet their needs.
4. User experience – SEO helps you provide a good user experience. The intention is to provide users with the information they are looking for easily and in fewer clicks.

Courtesy: backlinkboss.com

In other words, there are many ranking factors used by Google in their algorithm. There are both on-page and off-page ranking factors that determine how well your site is optimized, and therefore how well it ranks.

Factors that impact your SEO Ranking

1.   Content marketing

Content is very important in helping your brand connect with website visitors as well as attracting search engines. When you have engaging and effective content on your website, your visitors are likely to spend more time on your website.

Similarly, the more the quality and relevance of your website, the more likely the search engines will rank your website higher in the search results. The secret to good and engaging content is to have a variety of content types that are very relevant to what your audience may be looking for.

Some of the content types you can use to improve the effectiveness and quality of the content on your website include:

• Blog articles
• Visual content like images and infographics
• Videos and audio
• Social media content
• Tutorials or how-to guides

2.   Onpage SEO

What is On-page SEO? This is an SEO tactic done on your website giving you complete control and allowing you to adjust them over time to go in line with the best SEO practices at that time.

Here are some of the On-page SEO factors that can help improve your on-page SEO rankings:

Title Tag

This tells the search engine what the web page is all about. We recommend 70 characters or less for the title. This includes your page title and the keyword your page focuses on.

Meta Description

This tells the search engines in detail what the web page is about. It can also be used by your website visitors to see the relevance of your content to what they are searching for. In addition, It should also include your keyword and also provide enough details for users to better understand your content.

Sub-headings

They not only make content easier to read but also boosts your on-page SEO. You can use H1, H2, and H3 tags.

Internal Links

Having internal links, or as they are called hyperlinks, to other content on your website, can help search engines easily crawl your site and better understand it. For example, you can provide links to the inner other pages with related content on your page. This improves your on-page SEO

Image Name and ALT Tags

If you are using visual content, especially images on your website, it is recommended to include your keyword or phrase in the image name and alt tag. This improves your onsite SEO definition which will help search engines better index your images, which may appear when users perform an image search for a certain keyword or phrase.

Mobile-friendliness

More than half of all web traffic is coming from mobile devices, which means that more than half of your audience is also likely to be on their mobile phones. Without a mobile-friendly website design, you could accidentally alienate half of your users. That is massive. A website with a high bounce rate due to not loading properly on a phone or tablet is going to send bad signals to Google, and your rankings could plummet.

User Experience

Poor web design can make it impossible for users to read what they came to your website to do. Just like websites that aren’t mobile-friendly, websites with overlapping texts and images on any device or desktop are going to turn people away quickly.

Website speed and performance

This is one of the most important aspects of on-page SEO, and it’s a primary deficiency for many websites. If your website does not rank well on search engines, it could be that your website takes too long to load and visitors are drawn away quickly. You, therefore, need to devote your time to speed up your site by optimizing your images, and scripts, eliminating unnecessary plugins, allowing browser caching, and so on. The loading speed of your website affects Google’s ability to crawl it. If your page speed causes Google to crawl fewer pages, you won’t have as many pages getting indexed.

Sitemaps

This a crucial element to have in place if you want search engines to be smarter about how they crawl your website. The sitemap provides search engines with sort of a guide or wireframe of all the pages and content on your website. This enables you to tell the search engines the most important pages on your site. Sitemaps also aid in user navigation. A new visitor to your website can refer to your sitemap to browse through it. Sitemaps also contain important metadata about your web pages to give them a better chance of ranking highly.

3.   Offpage SEO

These are SEO tactics done off your website. Some of the off-page SEO factors that affect your search engine rankings include:

• Trust – This is how search engines determine whether your website is legit and can be trusted by visitors. One way to gain trust is by building backlinks from other websites that already have the authority or are trustworthy thus improving your off-page SEO.
• Back Links – Just as I mentioned in the previous point, backlinks are very important to building off-page SEO. Build relationships with influencers and other writers who create quality content and will have a link to your website in their content. Spam sites with your links, however, may result in banning your website from search engines.
• Social – This includes likes and shares of your quality content from your website visitors which is a big boost to your off-page SEO.

Given you have no direct control over what happens outside your website, having quality content that provides value to your website visitors is the way to go. The more compulsive and appropriate your content is, the more likely others will share it on social media. See also CPA (cost-per-acquisition)

Conclusion

In conclusion, SEO is best done in partnership with web design, and improving your web design doesn’t have to be difficult. In our next article on SEO, we will provide you with a complete guide to improving the SEO of your website.