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Mike Baker
April 20, 2022
Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is all about setting up your website to show up in Google search results (as well as other Search Engines like Bing and Yahoo) and helping you achieve the highest possible rank amongst the competition so that you can get more eyes on your listing and ideally, more visitors to your site.
The world of search engine optimization is complex and ever-changing, but we hope that this article provides you a basic understanding of the key terms and definitions of SEO and why it is vital to the success of your website.
Why does my website need SEO?
The majority of web traffic is driven by the major commercial search engines, Google, Bing, and Yahoo!. Although social media and other types of traffic can generate visits to your website, search engines are the primary method of navigation for most Internet users. This is true whether your site provides content, services, products, information, or just about anything else.
Search engines are unique in that they provide targeted traffic—people looking for what you offer. Search engines are the roadways that make this happen. If search engines cannot find your site, or add your content to their databases, you miss out on incredible opportunities to drive traffic to your site.
Search queries—the words that users type into the search box—carry extraordinary value. Experience has shown that search engine traffic can make (or break) your business’s success. Targeted traffic to a website can provide publicity, revenue, and exposure like no other channel of marketing. Investing in SEO can have an exceptional rate of return compared to other types of marketing and promotion.
Moz is one of the most popular SEO websites that provides training and resources for effective SEO. As explained on their Beginner’s Guide to SEO article, The foundation of good SEO begins with ensuring crawl accessibility, and moves up from there.
Using their beginner’s guide, you can follow these seven steps to successful SEO:
- Crawl accessibility so engines can read your website
- Compelling content that answers the searcher’s query
- Keyword optimized to attract searchers & engines
- Great user experience including a fast load speed and compelling UX
- Share-worthy content that earns links, citations, and amplification
- Title, URL, & description to draw high CTR in the rankings
- Snippet/schema markup to stand out in SERPs
Source: https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo
In order to understand how you can create optimized web pages to rank well in Search, think of SEO in two main strategies: On-Page SEO and Off-Page SEO. Let’s explore these further.
What is On-Page SEO?
On-page SEO (also known as “on-site” SEO) is the act of optimizing different parts of your website that affect your search engine rankings. It’s stuff that you have control over and can change on your own website. Here are the biggest factors included:
- Title Tags
- Headings (H1, H2, H3, etc.)
- URL structure
- Alt text for images
- Page load speed
- Page content
- Internal Linking
Did You Know?
At VikingOne5 Media, when we build websites for our clients, we take care of all of the On-Page SEO for you, included in the price of your website. This allows you to hit the ground running when we launch your website, because you will already be setup to start ranking in Google and other search engines. In fact, most of our clients are ranking on Page 1 of Google within a month, sometimes even faster.
And if you already have a website that was built by yourself or another web design agency, but want to improve your SEO, we can help with that too (as long as it is a WordPress website).
What is Off-Page SEO?
Off-page SEO focuses on increasing the authority of your domain (your website URL) through the act of getting links from other websites to point back to your site.
A good analogy for how authority works is this. If you have a bathtub with rubber duckies in it (the ducks are your pages), and you start filling the tub with water (links), your duckies are all going to rise to the top.
This is how a site like Wikipedia ranks for pretty much everything under the sun. It has so much water in its bathtub that if you throw another rubber duck in it, it’s going to float to the top without any other effort.
There’s a score called “Domain Authority” that calculates how authoritative your website is compared to other sites. You can type your domain name into here to see your score.
The biggest off-page SEO factor is the number and quality of backlinks to your website. Building backlinks to your website will take time and will require you to be invested in promoting your website.
Some examples of ways you can build links to your website are:
- Creating awesome content that people want to link to because it is valuable
- Social media shares of your content that ultimately generate links
- Outreach e-mails to influencers in your industry that ultimately link to you
- Guest blogging on sites related to yours. These guest posts will have links back to your site
Ready for help with your SEO?
We know first hand how confusing and challenging SEO can be, and we realize you may not have the time nor desire to dive into SEO on your own. So if you need someone to do the SEO work for you, Hire us! We are SEO experts and have the tools and strategy to help your website rank higher.
We hope you found this article helpful and we wish you all the best with your website and business!
And remember, if you need further support with your website, we are here to help. We offer full WordPress training and support so that you can get the most out of your website.
Thank you,
VikingOne5 Media
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