What Is SEO?
February 19, 2019
What Is SEO?
SEO consists of:
-
Research and planning for content strategy – aligning website pages & content to target keywords
-
Content production management
-
Continuous site audits of on-page errors, bugs, broken links, pictures, and other things that could negatively affect SEO
-
Outreach marketing to find influencers and websites to negotiate sponsored content and guest posts for backlinks
-
Online reputation management, keeping the brand looking good across the Internet
-
Strategize to find opportunities to expand the organic reach of the brand
-
Build out an internet footprint that will push Google to push the brand into good search placement
What are backlinks and SEO in general?
Backlinks are any link that points to your website from another (external) website.
NOTE: Ideally, the backlinks are on websites related to your niche, audience, or related audience.
What problem do backlinks and SEO solve?
Google, and every other search engine use backlinks to determine what your website is about, what it’s known for, and as a measure of how popular and trusted your website is.
Getting traffic that converts is a difficult task, but getting enough of the right backlinks will help Google associate you with the keywords you need to put your website directly at the fingertips of your target audience.
What are other benefits of backlinks and SEO?
Outside of getting an organic audience that converts, backlinks can also draw targeted traffic in from other websites. This gives your website the benefit of the SEO efforts that the other website may have already earned, allowing you to siphon from their work and increase your revenue as well.
Why does my website only rank for my name?
The most common problem is that people and web developers seldom consider the SEO strategy during the initial planning of the website. The website, especially the homepage, are often designed beautifully to convert traffic that comes, but how will that traffic get there in the first place?
If you are selling artistic cell phone covers, most likely your website’s homepage isn’t going to have optimized content with keywords like “buy cell phone covers,” but will have “XYZ’s phone art” or “ABC’s design.” These are keywords that are rarely searched and not valuable. You are missing the entire ocean of people who don’t know you but want to buy what you are selling! So go title your website for the most important keyword you want to rank for!
What Is On-Page SEO?
On-page SEO (also known as “on-site” SEO) is the act of optimizing different parts of your website that affect your search engine rankings.
When we conduct on-page SEO, we optimize:
-
Title Tags
-
H1/H2
-
URL Structure
-
Alt Text for Images
-
The speed of the page load
-
Internal Linking
-
Page content
What is Off-Site SEO?
Off-site SEO is the process of creating the natural digital footprint that a successful or even viral website possesses. There are certain characteristics, from comments on blogs to entire articles with contextual backlinks, that make up the vast majority of these signals. Off-Site SEO will and should be one of your major, recurring marketing costs. Your competition is already doing it, which is why they are so successful you already know who they are.
FYI: Our job as a marketing agency is to simply out-compete the Off-Site SEO efforts of your competition.
Will HTTPS affect SEO?
An SSL (HTTPS) secures and encrypts the traffic and communication so hackers can’t steal your client’s personal information like credit cards and addresses. Google essentially mandates that all websites are on HTTPS, so it’s essentially necessary going forward.
Are SEO meta tags important?
Yes, they are important for Google to associate your website with self-selected keywords used inside these tags. They are also important because this is the text users of Google see in results, and gives you an opportunity to create better, more clickable titles, to capture clicks from Google.
Will blogging help SEO?
Yes, it shows Google that your website is healthy, active, and growing to remain competitive and relevant. It is also a great opportunity to create content that targets long-tail keywords.
Follow vs. Nofollow links: What’s the difference?
When a backlink is created, it falls into one of these two categories based on how it’s coded into the article. Both are valuable and necessary, although Follow, often called Do-Follow, are better as they tell Google that the website it’s linking to is trusted and safe, and to pass along “link-juice” to that website. No-Follow doesn’t pass along the “link-juice,” but it’s perfectly natural to have these types of backlinks. If you only have and only seek Do-Follow links, that’s potentially a risk as it’s not natural.
