SEO, Search Engine Optimization, is an essential digital marketing tool used to get your website to rank organically or naturally on all major search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo.
It is vital to your business’ online success to ensure your website is optimized for search engines. Since you stand a better chance of having it organically rank higher on search engines, you are able to reach your audience at little to no cost. In fact, over 3.5 billion searches happen every day on Google. Using SEO optimally will help you tap into your share of that market.
Since Google has close to 90% share of the search engine market, well focus on the on-page SEO techniques to rank higher there.
On-page SEO
If you want Google to display your website when a potential customer searches for something relevant to your business, you need to make it easy for Google and other search engines to find you. Search engines need to clearly understand what your website is about.
To do this, you need to do keyword research. This will show you the average number of times someone searches for a specific keyword or phrase in Google each month. There are various online tools you can use for this task like Google Trends.
Make sure your title tags and meta descriptions are optimized in line with the keywords you want to rank for. These are the headlines and paragraphs you see on the search results page before clicking through to a website. The H1 tag headings on your website’s pages should also be optimized with your keyword in mind. The same goes for the actual content on the page.
Remember that ultimately you sell to real people, and tactics like keyword stuffing will not be beneficial in the long run.
Off-page SEO
Once you have done your keyword research and optimized your main pages with the keyword in mind, you need to consider off-page SEO like link building. This is the process of getting another website to link to yours.
Sites with a high amount of traffic can help drive traffic to your site. The number of times your site has links from other sites also affects your ranking.
But getting started with on-page SEO basics will already put you a step ahead of many other websites.
By continuously monitoring SEO building blocks like keywords, it will help improve your visibility on search engines. You can also opt to use various SEO tools for each task, like using Google Keyword Planner to optimize your keywords.
It’s important to remember that there are no SEO shortcuts. It is a continuous task to keep rankings high and a long-term commitment that will ultimately be to your benefit.