Digital Marketing Class

Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is a great way to improve the rankings of a website and optimizing elements for any website. This allows for more variety and can even improve visibility of your content contained in your website. This blog will be reviewing the outputs that can be created with varies key elements to help make your website beat out your competition in Google rankings.

Why is SEO an important part of online marketing?

SEO might seem a bit confusing to begin with, but by the end of this blog, you will have a better understanding of how to use it. Although your website business might be medium or small-sized, SEO is a non-cost effective way that is proven to improve searches for your site. Compared to Search Engine Marketing, or SEM, which is a way to get traffic towards your website with the use of paid and ‘organic’ searches. Below are 3 ways to that you can take into consideration when optimizing the searches for your business.

Google ranks each and every website you access based off of the content and optimization it has. Google does this to help create happy customers and generate more traffic, which can lead to more money. Google uses this technique to create a search engine for people.

1. Keywords

In order to get the most effectiveness out of SEO for your website, you can start with simply using keywords to help customers search for your products and or services. Keywords help to research and analyze popular search terms, words and phrases people type into search engines. There are 2 different types of keyword searches: Offline Keyword Research and Online Keyword Research.

Offline Keyword Research can help you with keyword research for a small business that does not have data you can base your campaign or content on for a start. This includes brainstorming, marketing collateral, customer surveys and salespeople.

Online Keyword Research can be anything from Google Autocomplete, Google Adwords, Keyword Planner & Google Trends. This type of keyword research is best used within the search engine and your website.

Keywords need to be relevant, enough for search traffic and to have low competition.

2. Website Optimization

Website optimization is the process of using advanced strategies, tools and experimenting to help improve website performance, traffic generated and grow revenue. With this, URLs should be optimized and include keywords. Alongside keywords, you want to include these following elements:

Meta Tag: Short pieces of text and descriptors of the context within the HTML code of a website that do not appear on the site itself. Meta tags are used to tell the search engine what the website is about.

Title Tag: These are the name of a web page in the tab of a browser (not a meta tag). These help ensure your listing on search engine pages say the correct information about your business. These are generally 50-60 characters and cut off after 67 characters.

3. Linking

Linking is a way to get more traffic generated to view your website. Linking combines lots of factors that can help optimize your webpage. Linking can involve the use of partnering with other companies and their website to help bring more awareness to each of the pages. Below are types of linking you can use to help optimize your business website:

1. Link Text: Text that appears on the page
2. Link URL: Destination to which the link will lead the user
3. Internal Links: Linking within your own website from one context to another page
4. Inbound Link: Link coming from another website and directs a user to your website
5. Outbound Link: Link leading to another website
6. Paid Link: Link coming from advertising

Both inbound and intern links are important for search engines. Internal links help give a better experience, which inbound links increase the relevance and credibility on certain topics.

How do these factors work together?

When your website withholds all of these factors, comparing fully optimized websites can help bring up the rankings of your website on Google and other search engines. Allows more diverse keywords, website optimization and linking are great ways to define your website’s title and ranking. Maintaining a measure of your performance, checking traffic with online/offline activities and viewing trends are ways in which to maintain a great SEO for your website.