SEO: A Quick And Easy Guide to Search Engine Optimization [2020]

Nowadays, the digital marketing world has multiple practices that help businesses achieve specific goals and be more profitable over time. There are inorganic marketing practices that are paid like pay-per-click (Google Ads, Bing Ads), email marketing, Facebook Ads, and more. There are others, like SEO, that are organic.  SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, and according to Moz, it is the practice of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through organic search engine results. Although SEO is a very long process, it has huge benefits over time. With it you can build business reputation, boost credibility, increase visibility and online presence, drive organic visits to your website and get quality leads. Good SEO means you won’t ever have to pay for ads.

How To Do It The Right Way

There are a variety of SEO strategies, but some, called black hat SEO, are seen as wrong. They don’t abide by search engine guidelines, but instead use tricks to gain rankings (and not very well). White hat SEO are practices that search engines do approve of. When thinking of the right path of SEO, there is only one: the white one. Doing this includes two methods: on-site SEO (also known as on-page SEO) and off-page SEO. On-page involves elements like creating content, or optimizing the HTML source code of a site or specific page. On the other hand, off-page, is associated with links and other external signals.

On-Page SEO

One of the basic things that includes is clean code. Clean code matters because clean code enhances the ranking performance of a website on search engines. Code is the language search engines use to understand the content, the purpose of a website, and the way it looks. Like any other language, it needs to be “well-spoken” and well-written in order to be understandable. Alt text (or alt tag) and title tags are elements of on-page SEO as well. However ,both are a part of clean code. Alt text for example, is an image tag within the code that explains to Google bots or Bing bots what the image is or shows. Title tags are html elements that indicate the title of a webpage and are displayed as a snippet result on search engine result pages (SERPs). Another major element of on-page SEO is content. Having properly written copy means your website’s content answers users’ queries and helps them find the information and solution they are looking for. Think about what your target audience needs and write valuable content to answer their questions. The content is very important: search engines like Google have confirmed that relevant content is the number one signal that they consider ranking some sites higher on search engine result pages (SERPs).   On-page SEO also includes keyword density. Keyword density is basically the percentage of times a keyword or search terms is on a page, to determine whether this page is relevant or not to the specific keyword. The key with this method is to add a keyword whenever it makes sense, to make sure your content is natural to the average user.

Off-page SEO

Off-page is related to link building, which is the process of getting hyperlinks from other sites to your own in order to build that reputation you need to rank better on search engine result pages. It’s pretty simple: when Google isees many sites linking to a website, it understands that that website is a source of information for others, which makes it relevant enough to rank better. An example of link building is guest blogs. Some websites offer to write content for other pages in order to be linked back to by relevant and highly reputable blogs.However, not all the websites are linked to valuable sites or pages. Making sure you disavow bad links will save your website from being penalized. How can you disavow bad links? Using a fantastic tool developed by Google called Search Console. Another method within off-page SEO that can be performed on Search Console is submitting new content to make it start appearing on search engine result pages. Citations are also part of the off-page work that should be done for a website. According to Moz, “A local citation is any online mention of the name, address, and phone number for a local business. Citations can occur on local business directories, on websites and apps, and on social platforms.” Citations are crucial in SEO because they ensure data accuracy and prove a local business does exist. This will help a website improve in ranking as well.

Want To Improve Your Website’s SEO?

S-FX.com Small Business Solutions can help you create a strategy that builds longer-lasting results and that generates high ROI long-term, just by doing SEO. S-FX.com Small Business Solutions is a boutique web design and technology consulting agency geared towards start-up businesses, small businesses and non-profit businesses. We specialize in implementing low cost technology solutions to maximize efficiency and reduce business operating costs.