Search Engine Optimization, or SEO for short, is the term to describe how visible your website or domain is within a regular search engine. Increasing SEO is crucial to your websites success as it drives traffic, and in turn, customers, to your site. Things like google adwords, keywords, and search engine marketing can seem intimidating at first, but once you start getting the hang of them, the entire process can be very rewarding.
The process: explained
Though the factors that affect SEO results can be quite complex, the basic process of it all is relatively simple. Search engines aim to provide the best results per user input. This involves delivering results on search engine pages that are high-quality, accurate, and relevant to what was initially searched. As a word or phrase is placed in the search, the search engine crawls through the thousands of websites to interpret what exactly they’re about. It rewards sites that are easy to read, include user-friendly navigation, and hold the most information closest to the search word; these are placed nearest to the top.
Search engine optimization entails applying this knowledge and catering the content on your site towards it. Making sure your site ranks highly in keywords and phrases across different search engines is the first step to driving traffic to your site from simple search alone.
How to increase SEO
While search engine giants like Google and Bing will never reveal their exact algorithm of search ordering, we’ve got a pretty good understanding of what it takes to stand out online. For starters, content is key. Including relevant, original content on your site the higher your pages will rank. When crafting page content though, it’s important to think about the human aspect as well. It has to be engaging engaging enough for a real customer to stop and want to read, not just lists of keywords to trigger the SEO. A good way of combining both aspects is tailoring a variety of well-written content pieces to things your audience would find relevant and entertaining. Take for example these site boosting pieces:
Original blog posts or articles
Video and audio files
How-to sections or DIY tutorials
Infographics or engaging data sets
Original photos with captions and links
Linked social media accounts and content feeds
Staying on top of your content is important to keeping your site at the top of search landings and keeping users engaged. Updating regularly with new content, making changes to previously posted sections, and maintaining an easy navigable site help keep your content fresh and thus deemed relevant by the search engines. Creating content may be a time consuming process, but the end benefits make it well worth the work.
Going deeper
Going past content marketing, there are both on and off page solutions that can help increase SEO. However, these tactics go much deeper into your site and involve the supporting HTML and backlinks. Things like title tags, metalinks, and sub-headings can be added to the back-end of your site and used to add “hidden” keywords, meant only for the search engine algorithm. It’s important however not to over optimize, as engines like Google will flag and penalize websites that include too many keywords, triggering them as spam.
Let’s work together
While SEO’s process is relatively simple, it involves a large time commitment and effort to start seeing results. As skilled marketers and WIX professionals, search engine optimization and content creation has become our specialty. If you’re feeling overwhelmed, not seeing any changes in your list position, or simply don’t know where to begin, reach out to us and let us help. We’ll tailor keyword lists, creative content, and back-end magic specifically to you and your companies needs. Call us at 512-571-2296 or email us info@barebones-marketing.com and let’s start getting the results you’ve always wanted.
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