What does SEO stand for?
SEO stands for “search engine optimization.” It is the process of getting traffic from the free and organic search results on search engines.
In short, SEO can be defined as a digital marketing strategy that helps increase the quantity and quality of the traffic to your site. The optimization part of SEO comprises of different options that you can take to rank higher on Google and thus get free organic traffic. Although it may seem tedious and painful at the start, SEO can actually be rather fun and easy to implement.
The best way to understand SEO nowadays is to break down its meaning. In that manner, SEO is:
- A marketing discipline – understanding SEO is crucial to all your marketing efforts because this way you will be able to drive traffic to your website and generate leads and conversions. You not only need to write content that Google likes but also content that will resonate with your audience.
- A technical task – knowing the best practices to optimize your content and site is important if you are planning to compete for traffic. People that know the ins and outs of search engine optimization are highly sought after because the ROI they bring is high.
How does SEO work?
When a user searches for a term on a search engine like Google, the results are a series of websites that are relevant to the query and websites that have a solid domain authority.
For example when you search for ‘web design Nerja’, the top results are the ones that are adopting the best SEO practices in Google eyes. This is mainly because the search engines use advanced crawlers that gather the information on every website, gathering every bit of content it can find on the Internet. That creates an index for every website that is compared to the algorithm that Google has built for the best SEO practice.
If you have a new site, how would you start with SEO?
First start with discovering your target audience, your niche and main keywords. After that use this information to build a website which will be search engine friendly, relevant and with value to your visitors.
Why should you do SEO at all?
SEO has the potential to drive tons of quality leads to your website for free. For instance, when you search for “axarquia webdesign“, aren’t you more likely to become a client of whoever shows up on Google? This is the power of search engine optimization. It brings you warm leads that you can later deliver ads to or even sell products to.
What is SEM?
SEM is simply broader term for marketing activities with final goal to attract more visitors, cover more different platforms, increase your brand awareness and ultimately make more sales.
SEM mechanisms include Search Engine Optimization (SEO), social networking, bid placement, pay-per-click (PPC), contextual advertising, paid inclusion, geomapping, AdSense and AdWords, as well as multiple media formats, such as YouTube and geospecific marketing, like Foursquare.
SEO vs PPC
Is SEO better than PPC? SEO is way better than PPC (pay per click) because you don’t have to spend money on ads to drive traffic to your site. With PPC, your traffic will stop as soon as you stop paying for ads. SEO has a much longer-lasting effect. On the flipside, the advantage of PPC is that if you have a well-converting sales page, you can very easily grow your sales from day 1 without having to wait for all the SEO efforts to kick in months later.
What are SEO backlinks?
Backlinks are simply links from an external site to yours. For example, when I link to specific website, I am generating a backlink for them. The more high quality backlinks you get, the higher the authority and rank of your site. Therefore, building backlinks is a key SEO task if you want to reach page #1.
Are these tips just for Google SEO?
Google dominates the search engine space with almost 80% of all global searches. Yahoo and Bing have about 9% each. Even though the techniques we’ve been discussing here are particularly about Google SEO, they apply to all search engines alike.
Are there any other alternatives to SEO?
Given that SEO’s main purpose is to drive traffic to your site, you can also get more visits by means of ads (like Google Adwords or Facebook ads) or using Social Neworks Marketing. You can also drive traffic through affiliate links and get quoted on articles in highly trafficked sites.
The Guide to improve SEO of any website
On-page SEO Factors
On-page SEO refers to any optimization that you can do to the structure of your site itself. Here are the most important aspects:
- Optimize your meta title and meta description.
Make sure to fill in a keyword rich title, description and headers. You can find very valuable and highly-converting keywords by looking at the Google Adwords being displayed when you search for your keyword. - Increase your page CTR
Add any of these proven keywords to the title and description of your post: Today, Right Now, Fast, Step-by-Step, Simple, Guide. Also add numbers, i.e. “22 Marketing Techniques You Must Try Today”. Having a high CTR will bump your page towards the top of the results. - Use descriptive and straightforward URLS
Create readable and easy to understand structure and address. Address as yourdomain.com/contact is much better that yourdomain.com/id=?3237724 for both crawl robots and people. - Link to authority sites
Various studies show that linking to high domain authority sites like Wikipedia or Harvard can increase your Google rankings. Make sure you include at least 3-4 outbound links on each post. - Make your site load fast
Google has indicated in their webmaster’s blog that page load time is one of the signals they look at when evaluating your site: “Faster sites create happy users and we’ve seen in our internal studies that when a site responds slowly, visitors spend less time there.” - Get an SSL certificate (i.e. https)
This will make your site more “legit” and secure but also will also give you a boost in the search results. - Learn how to write the perfect SEO content
By perfect I not only mean SEO-wise but also content-wise such as this article, so you keep people on your site and also generate business from it. - Add multimedia to your posts
That will make your site more useful to the user and will also make them spend more time on it. (Bonus) Read my in-depth article that covers all the on-page SEO factors. In short, make sure your User Experience (UX) is top-notch.
Don’t Forget These 3 Equally Important Off-Page SEO Factors
Here are some key factors that most people miss when it comes to off-page SEO:
- You need tons of Social Signals
Yes, Google DOES care about how much social traffic and shares your article gets. Here are some ideas to boost that. Join a lot (and I mean a lot) of Facebook Groups in your niche. Post to all those groups every time you create a new post, and repost every 2-3 months. This will increase your traffic like crazy, not to mention that each share, like, and comment adds to your social score. - Build Powerful backlinks from high authority sites
This is tricky part as quality trumps quantity, although quantity shouldn’t be overlooked. A shout out from Forbes is worth a lot more than 100 lower-tier sites, but the lower-tier sites can help you achieve good backlink volume.
Build relationships with writers in your space so that they cover you not just once but multiple times. Provide valuable and unique content in your field to your visitors by blog or social networks. - Build a Brand
Building a brand will help you get even more traffic and brand awareness over time.
Will all this effort pay off?
Yes. It will.
SEO is essential tool to attract audience to your website in medium long term. By bringing more visitors to your website, the website can perform its initial goal of serving the visitors and converting them to clients. Another advantage is that you control the process on your website and having no direct cost.
We at Keev studio offer a broad range of SEO services, from a small and quick adjustments, to the complete SEO strategy for your online project.
