Uncover the True Meaning of SEO

SEO Definition: Uncover the True Meaning of SEO

What is SEO: What the heck is SEO? It’s a word you’ll hear ad nauseam when you have a chat about online marketing and presence, but just what is it? Why does it enjoy such prominence in a proprietor’s digital vision? I’d like to describe what is SEO and explain its core concepts to you, so you can understand this critical component of your online strategy. SEO is Search Engine Optimisation: a word you’ll hear thrown about quite a bit when you’re having a chat about websites, and it basically encapsulates the entire discipline of online marketing that has to do with enhancement to any facet of visibility in search result listings, or what’s known as Search Engine Results Pages, or SERPs, for short.

What Is SEO?

What is SEO? SEO is the process of increasing the visibility of a website. (‘Search engine optimisation’ is of course the full name.) In other words, SEO is about making a website appear in Google, Bing or Yahoo – or whatever search engine – when someone types in certain keywords in the search box. Put another way, in terms that translate into people’s real lives, SEO is about making a website appear on the first page of results when someone types in the words that relate either to that website’s theme, products or services.

The Basics of SEO

Keywords

And keywords are the words and phrases people would type into a search. Keywords are a zoom lens, because search is technically a zoom. If you write for one keyword, you get a compass rose for everything you do with the content. If you get better at using them, your site is more likely to appear in the search results.

On-Page SEO

On-page SEO is the behind-the-scenes of a website working on each page to rank in the search results. This includes site-wide ranking factors such as meta titles and descriptions, header tags and content. On-page optimisation also includes adding keywords in the copy as naturally as possible.

Off-Page SEO

On-page SEO is anything on your site that affects your SEO, and off-page is anything done for your site not on your site; often it’s anything that increases the probability that your site will appear in an organic search results page (SERP). For example, one of the most important pieces of off-page SEO is building an ever-growing library of high-quality inbound links from reputable sources to your site.

Why Is SEO Important?

Note that SEO Definition can already give you an excellent idea of the importance of SEO in online marketing at the moment. Here are few main reasons why you need an SEO specialist: 1. All the traffic comes from search engines like Google.

Increased Visibility

SEO however works on the premise of ranking up your website in searches it deems relevant to your business, the higher it ranks, the more the corresponding site is displayed to your prospect when she searches the keywords you have identified for yourself or related keywords.

Organic Traffic

If SEO were greyhound racing, the organic traffic would be the hare: unpaid traffic to your website, which would be the likely statistic for a given keyword, maybe one someone Googled, such as ‘top SEO tips’, or ‘website management for writers or bloggers’. Organic traffic can be far more valuable than paid-advertising traffic.

Cost-Effectiveness

SEO differs from paid adverts in that it involves investing time and energy but not money – there’s no payment per click or impression (it’s slow, but if it works, the effects can last a long time).

Components of Effective SEO Strategies

Having understood the SEO Definition, let’s delve into the components that make SEO effective:

Content Quality

Yes, good copy still matters in SEO: high-quality, useful and enjoyable content will attract users, and keep them actively on your website pursuing their objectives, which reduces your bounce rates as well as conditioning the search engines to believe your site is more rewarding and worthy of a good rank.

User Experience

It’s intuitive to assume that an easy-to-navigate, user-friendly website will provide a better experience for visitors. User experience is, in fact, one of the many ranking signals considered by search engines such as Google, which ranks pages according to how quickly they load, and how suitable they are for mobile use.

Technical SEO

These are the technical bits – the sitemap, the robots.txt file, schema markup and other data that influence the extent to which your site gets crawled and indexed.

Sitemaps

It’s a way to tell search engines how your website is structured, and helps them understand when you’ve added new pages.

Robots.txt

It describes a set of pages you don’t want to be indexed by search engines. Among other things, it can also block spidering of duplicate content, and it can stop unimportant pages from being indexed.

Link Building

Get inbound links (links from other high quality sites) to your site: search engines will look at the number of links to a site and see it as an authority and therefore at the top of the rankings. (Aim for quality not quantity.)

Social Signals

Similarly, social network engagement – for example, on Facebook or Instagram – can ratchet up a lagniappe of SEO because it drives more traffic to your site and increases the recognition, or ‘brand equity’, you have among your shoppers.

Tracking Your SEO Success

They’ll also have to continually track how well any SEO they’ve done is working by using free tools such as Google Analytics and Google Search Console, which aid in tracking how well your site is faring over time, the way users behave, and where they’re coming from.

Metrics to Monitor

Organic Traffic: The number of visitors you receive from the search engine results. Bounce Rate: Percentage of site visitors who view only one page of your site before leaving.

Conversion rate: the proportion of visitors who completed a particular action (eg, paying for something or filling in a form)

Keyword Rankings: Tracking where your site ranks for target keywords over time.

Wrapping It All Up

Knowing what SEO is, we can use this type of marketing to our advantage to improve our online footprint. By creating great content, optimising for different on-page SEO aspects, building links from quality sources, and consistently tracking your success, you can place your website at the top of search results organically, and thus direct more traffic to your website. Keep in mind, SEO is an ongoing process, and staying up to date with the latest SEO trends and best practices is also an important part of keeping and enhancing your rankings in the long-term. For more information on how you can grow your business with the help of SEO, the call MomentumPro – your trusted SEO specialists near Tampa Bay.