The Basics of Search Engine Optimization
Search engine optimization is a process that enables your website to rank in Google for its most relevant search queries. Any business owner who wants to gain a steady stream of high-quality leads from search should consider developing a solid SEO strategy from the very first day their website goes live. This article is an overview of the most important search engine optimization principles, and it should allow you to understand how search engines work and what signals they use to rank websites.
SEO consists of two main parts, namely on-site and off-site optimization. On-site SEO refers to your website in itself. Ideally, you should assign the main keyword to each of your pages, and then optimize the content around this term. Include synonyms and variations of the keyword, as this will help you with the Latent Semantic Indexing of your pages.
Ensure your main keyword is always present in the title of the page, in the first and the last paragraph, as well as in some of the headlines. Nonetheless, don't overdo it, because keyword stuffing is considered a black hat technique and it may get your site banned by Google.
The loading speed is also very important, so do your best to optimize your code for fast loading. There are free websites where you can test the speed of your pages and get advice in regard to improving this parameter. You may need to hire a professional web developer to help you, so make sure you set aside some money for this.
Off-page SEO is more difficult to master, as it involves finding inbound links to your website among other things. Depending on the topics of your website and of your writing skills, you may or may not be able to make people want to link to your in a natural way. As buying links isn't something Google would reward with anything else than a penalty, you need to unleash your creativity and to figure out some safe methods to get links.
As social media is one of the ranking signals, it comes without saying that you'll need to create profiles on two or three networks of your choice. Furthermore, you'll need to create some compelling content for these profiles, in order to attract people to interact with your posts and to appreciate your profiles.
These are the basics of SEO in a nutshell. If you don't have a budget for SEO activities, you can apply these principles to your website by yourself. However, if you want to take your business to the next level, you'll need to hire a professional SEO agency to help you rank for the best keywords in your niche. As good keyword research is key to becoming successful, you should pay close attention to it right from the start. This means that you should do your best to either buy a keyword research tool and a course to teach you how to use it or to outsource this task to experts. This is too important to fail at it.
