So, you’re looking for tips on how to get more traffic to your website. You’ve now seen the term “SEO” a million times, but you have no idea what SEO means. Allow this humble article to introduce you to the wonderful world of SEO Marketing.
What Is SEO?
SEO is short for Search Engine Optimization. It’s the method by which websites get organic, unpaid traffic from search engine results. Optimizing your website is the key to becoming attractive to search engines.
How Search Engines Work
To be attractive to search engines, you have to understand how they function. In a nutshell, search engines comb through millions of web pages to bring the viewer the most relevant content possible. It’s how Google answers questions, defines words for you, and more.
But let’s dig deeper. You’re probably asking, “So, what makes a search engine tick?”
Search engines have three working parts: crawlers, indexes, and ranks.
Crawlers are bots that a search engine uses to discover content such as videos, PDF’s, blogs, and articles, via links. Crawlers will stay longer on sites of higher quality. Think of them as little spiders that hop from link to link within your website until they leave.
Indexes are the databases where crawlers dump the most relevant information from crawling.
Ranks are essentially the end product of crawling. After crawlers index all the webpages they find, they display the top-ranking web pages first.
Understanding SERP Rankings
SERP is short for Search Engine Results Page. For your SEO marketing needs, ranks on these results pages are the most important thing to pay attention to. Search algorithms are constantly changing.
Why User Intent Matters
User Intent is what the user wanted from the search engine. For instance, if you were to type “bird” into Google, the search engine would assume that you want to see the definition of the animal, as well as pictures of that animal. But if you type “bird with white spots” instead, the search engine will show you a specific species of bird that matches that description.
Keywords: they’re the linchpin of any good SEO marketing strategy. What does your website offer? Research the phrases your viewers would potentially use to find you. When you look at your website from the consumer’s perspective, you’ll understand how to cater your content to their needs.
Content Is King
Search Engines reward quality content.
Don’t copy other pages! Do you know what Google does with two pages that look exactly the same? It only picks one page to index and ignores the other. Duplicate content ranks much lower in the SERP than original pages. Search engines go out of the way to remove duplicate results from what the user will see.
Remember: quality beats quantity!
Avoid saturating your website/blog with keywords. Some websites use shady tactics to try to “fool” the system. One of these methods is stuffing keywords into a jumbled mess on a page. Saturating your webpage with keywords may seem like the easiest way to gain traffic, but it will always backfire. Google treats these kinds of pages as spam, as they should.
Beyond Basic SEO: Link Building
As you go about optimizing your website, consider linking trusted webpages as well as your own backlinks, like this. Backlinks will help crawlers jump to more pages on your website, which in turn, contributes more information to the index.
The more relevant your information is to the index, the higher you rank on the SERP. Think of your users, and watch your rank on the SERP soar to new heights in 2021.
For more marketing tips, contact us here at V12 Strategies. With our help, you can take your SEO marketing to the next level.
