You have a website that you've spent hours building, and now, you're just missing one thing: traffic. It's common to get so caught up in making a website that you overlook the most important element, which is optimizing it to get seen online. Advertising is important, but the best way to boost visibility is to make sure search engines display your site to people looking for what you offer. You do this through a practice called search engine optimization, or SEO for short.
What Is SEO?
SEO is the practice of optimizing a website to be shown more by search engines (namely, Google). It uses a combination of on-page, off-page, and technical tasks to help more people find a website online when they search for related terms.
For example, let's say you run a bakery in San Francisco. You'd need to optimize your website for people searching for not only "bakeries in San Francisco" but also pastries near them. Keywords like "best cupcakes in San Francisco" or "wedding cake designer in San Francisco" could help you crawl to the top of search engines and eventually get seen by potential customers.
This is an extremely simplified example. Let's go more into detail about how SEO works by looking at its three core elements.
On-Page SEO
The content you write on your website is what counts in on-page SEO. Headings formatted for importance using H1, H2, H3 headers, and so on are a part of this; but so are the words you use, the way you write, and how you organize content on your website.
Here are some pointers to maximize your on-page SEO efforts:
- Optimize for local SEO to make sure that your website is optimized for the area your business serves.
- Develop a clear content strategy to make sure that your website's blog content is consistent and targets relevant keywords.
- Research keywords to find out what your ideal customers are looking for and how they look for it online.
- Use site monitoring tools and analytics to measure performance.
Off-Page SEO
Off-page SEO is all about acquiring backlinks. These are links from other websites that go to yours. Backlinks from reputable sites tell search engines that your website is a reliable source. To get backlinks, you can look into:
- Posting share-worthy content people post online.
- Guest blogging on relevant sites in your industry.
- Sharing content on social media.
- Submitting your site to directories.
Technical SEO
Technical SEO looks under the hood of your website to understand it from a mechanical standpoint. It optimizes things like code and page descriptions to give your site a higher chance of ranking well. Technical SEO can help correct unseen issues that harm your site's ranking, like broken links and 404 redirects.
Technical SEO also includes metadata, which tells search engines what each page is about and even displays in many search engines.
Conclusion
SEO is a crucial skill for anyone who runs a website. While it may seem overwhelming at first, it's really just a matter of testing and refining your practice. You can also work with a marketing agency that specializes in SEO to give your website a boost and develop a strategy with professionals.