A Quick Hello to SEO

What exactly is SEO? Is it helpful in growing your business?

These are a few questions that might come to mind when you hear the term SEO. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, which allows search engines to more easily index your website for consumer searches. Some businesses still do not understand and value SEO, opting to ignore it during web development – leaving valuable digital visibility for your products or services behind.

So, what exactly does SEO entail?

SEO involves making your website attractive to search engines, so they can determine your website’s ranking based on relevance, authority, and user experience. Search engines strive to deliver the proper information to consumers from trustworthy sites. To see if this content is available on your website, it sends “crawlers” to your website to determine how relevant and credible your various web pages are. The foundation of SEO is building an efficiently crawled website. Streamlining the web crawlers’ path ensures that they swiftly aggregate the right keyword-based content. The result is an engine that properly matches specific services or products.

While there are various strategies to improve your SEO and search engine ranking that are complicated and take time to implement, here are some quick and easy tips to improve your SEO now:

• Check if your website is “crawler-friendly” on Google Search Console
• Check if your website is mobile friendly on Mobile Friendly Test
• Review and edit website content to contain relevant and well-written verbiage.
• Use detailed keywords to reach your specific audience.
  • Keywords are searchable terms that can bring consumers to your site.
  • Some good websites to help use for finding and creating keywords are Google Keyword Planner and Ubersuggest
  • Note: keyword stuffing, having your keyword appear in inappropriate places, damages your SEO.
• Have a blog on your website with content that relates to your keywords.
• Optimize images on your web pages by making sure they are properly named (see final bullet) and have ALT text (a short description that helps search engines find and read the image).
• Write a guest blog on a relevant site that can link back to your web site.
  • Links from relevant sites contribute to your SEO
  • Note: links from fake sites (sites made only to link back to your website) damage your SEO
• Make sure your web page has an XML map that is easily read by search engine crawlers (most WordPress suites, and hosting platforms have built in functions for this)
• Make sure all domains on your page have a name and use hyphens (-) instead of underscores (_). (This includes images on your site.)
  • Correct: www.yoursitename.com/your-blog-post
  • Incorrect: www.yourwebpage.com/blob_839BheW