If you are new to search engine optimization (SEO) and want to learn more about it so that you can do it like a pro, this is the right place to be. In this article, you will learn the necessary and simple steps that will help you in the process and gain valuable insights about Search Engine Optimization.
Don’t have time to learn SEO? Please contact us for help. Or you can also skip this article and outsource the job. If you are in our area, you can contact us for more information, or if you are in the Washington, DC area, visit one of our SEO partners Social Market Way SEO Company. By outsourcing SEO work, you can ensure that your website is accessible by the search engine crawlers without a substantial investment of your own time.
Before you start with the steps for SEO, you should know why it is essential for a website. Ideally, SEO will ensure that the site is ranked high in the search engine result pages. This approach will secure higher visibility of the site and more click-through rates. Hence, making sure the engagement level of the users is high will give you an advantage over your competition.
Now that you know the need for an SEO today, you can proceed with the steps to know about how to do it.
Learn how search engines work
By understanding how search engines work, you are taking the first step to practicing effective SEO. You will also learn that SEO will help you a great deal in increasing the visibility of your website in search engines.
Search engines have a three-stage approach to evaluating your website:
- Crawling a site
- Indexing every page of the site and finally
- Giving it rank in their result pages.
The essential element that determines the site rank in the search engine algorithm that tends to change without notification. However, if the level of engagement in a site is high, it is a good sign that search engines will rank your website in search results.
The Role of SEO in SEM
The next step involves knowing the purpose of SEO in modern digital marketing. SEO is a part of SEM or Search Engine Marketing. The process of SEO includes getting traffic from different search engines. This traffic can be gained organically through proper SEO or by using different paid search ads.
There are different components of Digital Marketing, and SEM is one channel. The other channels in digital marketing include:
- Social media marketing or SMM
- Email marketing and
- PPC Advertising
It is important not to mix up SEO with paid advertising as both are different. Therefore it is essential to track and monitor the results of your SEO efforts separately from your SEM and digital marketing activities to get an accurate measure of your effectiveness in each.
Google and other search engines are transparent that they don’t accept payment to rank your web pages in organic search engine results. However, your digital marketing channels are all related, and the efforts in one area can impact your results in others. Therefore your overall SEO campaign results can get better results if you are active in other areas of Digital Marketing, including PPC, social media, email, and content marketing.
What is SEO?
The next step involves understanding what exactly SEO is, how it is essential in modern business marketing strategies for any website. As said earlier, the purpose of SEO is to make a site appear at the top of Search Engine Result Pages (SERPS). The process of applying SEO techniques involves using a particular set of rules for website design and content marketing as it relates to your target keywords.
The importance of proper SEO is immense. It can help your site appear in the first five positions on the first page of the search results. Or it can improve the number of clicks your website receives as a percentage of the number of times viewed or your website’s Click Through Rate.
Proper SEO will ensure that your site gets significant traffic not only from Google but other search engines as well.
Three practice areas for SEO
Now that you have some basic knowledge of SEO and its importance in this modern business world, the next step is to learn about the different SEO practices and processes.
SEO is a vast topic and has numerous factors that influence SEO ranking. You will need to consider these factors when you want to make your site optimized so that it can rank for Google’s algorithms.
We can break SEO down into practice areas, out of which there are a large number of sub-processes and a variety of SEO rules. The three most important are:
- Technical SEO: This is the process that involves crawling of the site and indexing of the pages.
- On-Page SEO: This process consists of optimizing the content of the specific page of a website so that the crawlers of the search the engine can understand it in a better way.
- Off-Page SEO: This process involves promoting the site on the internet to gain more links from other websites.
These links in SEO are considered as the ‘votes of trust’ and therefore have the potential to influence the site rankings in the search results positively.
Use of keywords and keyword research
By now, you must know that SEO places importance on the keywords. Therefore, you will need to research selecting the best keywords to use according to your industry niche.
Keywords are the phrases that the users type in a search engine search box during any of their search queries. These keywords vary according to the importance of it for a particular website.
Therefore when doing SEO, you will need to:
- Research for the right type of keywords and
- Use those words strategically so that your content is not keyword-stuffed.
This process is crucial because all other SEO phases beyond the technical SEO phase are strongly associated with your keyword research. Hence the foundation of your SEO efforts is set through proper keyword research and strategy. You will want to make sure you get it done right.
Measure SEO performance
Next, you will have to measure SEO performance. Tracking your progress is a critical step because you will need to know which KPIs to measure and how they can impact the profitability of your business.
There are two essential free tools that most webmasters use to evaluate performance: Google Analytics and Google Search Console.
- Google Search Console will let you know how the site is performing and
- Google Analytics will tell you what the users do when they visit your website.
If you are using a different platform, you will need to embed unique code in the header of your website. Installing these tools into your site can be a substantial task unless you are an experienced web designer.
WordPress users can install Google’s latest plugin, called Site Kit, for easy 5-minute setup. The plugin is free and makes it easy to set up all of Google’s SEO and webmaster tools into your website, including Search Console, Analytics, AdSense, page speed insights, Tag Manager, and optimize.
We hope this article gives you a jumpstart on learning SEO for marketing your business. If you don’t own a business, you can put SEO to work by choosing a topic to start a blog. Make sure that you know about the subject well and passionate about it.
If you don’t have time to learn SEO, contact our team to schedule an appointment to get started.
