A Very Basic Introduction to SEO

Your website is essentially an ambassador for your business. If you have a checkout or an orders page on your site, then you can use your site to get direct conversions or generate leads for future sales.

But for that to work, you need to help people get to your site and that’s where SEO comes in. SEO stands for ‘Search Engine Optimization’ and is one of the most effective ways to increase traffic to your website.

The Objective

The objective of SEO is to build and promote your website in order for it to rank highly on Google. This means that when someone searches for a service your site provides, it will appear as the first result or on the first page of results (we call these pages ‘SERPs’, or ‘Search Engine Results Pages’).

Keyword Research

Your site isn’t going to appear on the first SERP every time, which is why you need to decide on the specific phrase or word you want to target. This is your keyword or keyphrase and a good SEO strategy should focus on several of these in order to generate the maximum traffic while ensuring that you’re targeting the right people. In other words, there’s no point targeting ‘how to lose weight’ if you’re selling a weight-loss program.

A good keyphrase should be relevant, it should be popular and it shouldn’t have too much competition. Here’s a post at MOZ on how to research your keyphrases.

Content

The most important thing you need to have on a website in terms of SEO is your content. There was a time that good content for SEO would involve regular repetition of keywords but Google has since clamped down on this behavior as it was being abused. Today, the best strategy is to write around the topic you’re targeting and to use lots of synonyms. Use your keyword once or twice but make sure you focus on quality first and write in a way that looks natural.

The more content you create, the more there will be for Google to index and the greater chance that there will be a match between what you’ve written and what someone searches. Here’s some advice on how to write great content.

Site Optimization

In addition to creating great content, you need to design your site in a way that makes it easy for Google to search and sends all the right signals regarding quality and authority. Small changes like using sitemaps can make a big difference and there are many other important points to consider too.

Link Building

Link building means creating inbound links to your site on websites blogs, forums or social media. Inbound links to your site help Google find your website, so the more you have, the more your content will show up. Moreover, Google considers each inbound link to be someone advocating for your content. The more inbound links the better, but again you need to ensure that the links look natural and varied to avoid looking manipulative. Here’s a list of link building strategies to start you off!