July 21, 2017
What is SEO?
Simply put, SEO, or Search Engine Optimization is a way to increase the quantity and quality of traffic to your website via organic results from online search engines.
Both technical and creative elements are incorporated in SEO work, as a way to drive traffic to your website and ensure you are visible to your target audience in an extremely saturated market:
Content Quality – Not only should content on your website use keywords that are relevant to your audience, it should also be totally original and user friendly.
Internal Links – A tactic used to push traffic around your site, lowering your bounce rate and consequentially improving your relationship with search engines.
Clean Website – A clear, concise, easily navigated website with relevant content is an SEO essential and can make a real difference to your organic search traffic.
Meta Descriptions and Tags – These very simple practices are designed to succinctly explain what your website and its content is about.
Domain Names – Selecting the appropriate domain name for your website is also an essential for Search Engine Optimization. Choosing a domain with too many hyphens or an irrelevant title will leave you a lot of work to do before search engines notice your website.
Community Engagement – Interacting with your users, either by way of a comments section or a contact page will not only ensure returning users but will also demonstrate to search engines that you are a consistently active website.
Headlines – Finding the perfect balance between a succinct title that is descriptive enough to reach your target audience is a tough ask but can be mightily rewarding for SEO purposes.
Reading Guidelines – Google and Yahoo!, the two most frequently used search engines on the web have best practices guidelines that will help you to specify and prioritize the elements needed for a superior search ranking.
Why Do Websites Need SEO?
While social media, print and online advertising are all satisfactory marketing tools to generate visits to your site, the primary method of internet browsing for users is through search engines, whatever your sites content may be. Research has shown that investing in SEO has unrivalled return in publicity, exposure and most importantly, revenue.
Search engines provide targeted traffic to your site; they direct consumers to your product. If your website’s SEO is not up to par with competitors, you will be lost amongst the everlasting pages of search engine results.
Nearly 100% of established online websites will have an SEO specialist or consultant that are constantly updating site content and exploring new ways to ensure full search engine optimization. A specialist employee of this type is now essential to most companies who wish to establish themselves in the market. Without a constant focus on SEO, competition will have the edge on your audience base.
Considering the way search engines are developing, it is unlikely that SEO will cease to be effective in the foreseeable future. Even the growing market of video based content requires SEO to gain enough exposure. That is why it must be a priority for any website that has yet to discover the wonders of Search Engine Optimization to explore its benefits immediately.
