Search Engine Optimization: The Basics of SEO & How to Get Started
Updated: Sep 2, 2021
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of improving your website's ranking in search engines by making it more appealing to the millions of potential customers searching the web. What does this mean?
Well, when someone types a keyword into a search engine like Google, Bing, or Yahoo!, and your site shows up on the first page of results, that means you are SEO-optimized!
But how do you get your site to show up on the first page for popular keywords? What exactly does SEO involve? And what can you do as an online business owner to enhance your website's visibility for these important queries? What forms of SEO exist and what are their functions? This article will answer all these questions and more!
SEO Vocabulary You Should Know
Common terms from a practical standpoint are not important but it is beneficial knowing their meanings and how they all complement each other in their own unique way.
Local SEO - A must for any business or service that serves its clients in a specific local area. Optimizing Your Online Presence to target and build a local audience of loyal customers.
Technical SEO - Covers various aspects of SEO like website scalability, website speed, handling larger amounts of data, improving SEO for mobile devices, and enhancing a page with Schema markup.
On-Page SEO - This is any SEO work that you do to your site's content. You can optimize the title tags, headings, and meta descriptions of each page, ensure your site structure is correctly set up to provide customers a great user experience, and also use SEO techniques such as keyword research and image optimization.
Off-Page SEO - This is SEO work which is the opposite of On-Page SEO. The Off-Page SEO process includes optimizations that are done outside of your websites such as link building, social media marketing, guest blogging to bring traffic from relevant sites that relate to your niche or industry.
SERP or SERPs - Search Engine Results Page is the page displayed by search engines in response to someone's search query.
Local SEO: The Secret to Explosive Growth for Local Businesses
Local SEO is a game-changer for any business that operates locally. SEO strategies continue to evolve over time, one thing we have noticed is that if you want your locally ran business to benefit from SEO and rank well in search results, then Local SEO is the way to go. Local SEO narrows down your competition to other businesses in your service area when done correctly. By reducing the number of large corporations and established businesses that are located outside of your service area, you have an exponentially better chance of ranking at the top of search engine results.
Reducing your competition to only local businesses is one of the best ways to jump ahead in search results and ensure the majority of your visitors are potential customers. You can start with creating and optimizing your Google My Business Page, Localizing every page of your website and submitting your site to local business directories. SEO has many benefits that are especially important for small businesses that operate on a local level.
So, What Is Localization?
Localization is a process that ensures that your website pages are optimized for people in the area, and for telling search engines where your target audience is located. Localization includes adding demographic keywords to your content, Localizing every page of your website, and submitting your site to local business directories. Localizing every page of your website includes adding location details to your titles, headings, and meta descriptions.
*Example*
Non-localized title tag -
"Increase Organic Traffic With Local SEO - RYSE SEO"
Localized title tag -
"Increase Organic Traffic With Local SEO | RYSE SEO | St. Petersburg"
Although the difference is just including the city, state or county in the title tags of your website, the impact can be the difference when it comes to your site ranking on the first page compared to the 3rd.
=> Localization can help you rank better on search engines by optimizing for people in the area and search engine bots. Local SEO narrows down the competition to only businesses in the service area.
How Your Business Can Benefit From Technical SEO In A Huge Way
In short, the key improvements you'll notice from Technical SEO are...
-Improve Your Ranking on SERPs
-Increase Conversions
-Build and Grow An Online Presence
Technical SEO is a subset of general search engine optimization or "SEO." This type of modification to the website code improves its visibility on SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages).
There are many technical aspects that can have big impacts on rankings including site speed, backlinks/inbound links, page load time, technical errors such as broken images and media files. All these technical factors contribute in some way to how well you rank with relevant queries related to your target audience's keywords. If you don't optimize each element properly then it significantly hampers your ability to reach the relevant audience you need to succeed.
When you begin implementing technical SEO into your website, be sure you have a Google Search Console set up properly to analyze all of the technical aspects of your web pages. Google Search Console "GSC" is the holy grail of technical information when it comes to maintaining a healthy and functional website that will rank well on google.
Some insights you can view on GSC include page speed, page ranking positions for individual keywords, mobile-friendliness, listing enhancements and a ton of other useful information you will need to claim the top spot of search results.
We highly recommend you consider technical SEO for your online business. It will improve your ranking, increase conversions and build an online presence!
On-Page SEO: How It's Done and Why You Can't Succeed Without It!
To get started with On-Page SEO, you'll need to know what terms your customers use to find what you are offering, we call this "Keyword Research". I can't stress enough how crucial it is that keyword research is done properly, doing this step wrong will have a snowball effect as you will optimize your site for words people may never use!