What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?

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What is Search Engine Optimization?

Main SEO elements (On-Page, Off-Page and Technical)

and factors to consider when developing your optimization strategy

        • How SEO Works?
        • On-Page SEO
        • Technical SEO
        • Factors impacting On-Page optimization
        • Off-Page SEO
        • Factors impacting Off-Page optimization
        • Conclusion

How SEO works?

First of all, what is SEO or search engine optimization? It is a digital marketing strategy that helps your site to rank high on search engine result pages (SERP), such as Google or Bing. It includes a collection of best practices and methods to help your site exude expertise, authority and trustworthiness to search engine users; as a result, get higher SERP rankings, beat competition and get more organic site traffic. 

Factors that you need to keep in mind when developing your SEO strategy:

      • Quality content. It helps to groom your site content to be more relevant and adept than your competition.
      • EAT Approach. Establish your business as an expert (E) in your field and and become an authority (A) which will make your website trustworthy (T) source of information for search engine users.
      • Ongoing optimization process, that influences your on-page, off-page and technical SEO aspects in order to deliver best available results and organic (free) traffic.

It is the most powerful digital marketing tool that can make you or break you, depending on the time and effort your business is dedicating to it. SEO is an investment, not expense. You either invest time and learn how to do it all yourself, or invest money to hire SEO agency to do it for you. Either way the process is well worth it. If done right, it will start bringing organic results as soon as 3-6 month and in 12 month you can climb to the first page of Google search results. You can also learn about latest trend of optimization in 2021 here.

When was the last time you went on the second or third page of search engine results when looking for something? Exactly! Statistics show that 75% of searchers never go beyond the first page and Google takes 92% of entire search engine market share in the world. That is the reason why, we will often refer to Google as a synonym to search engine.

There are two main types of Search Engine Optimization you need to consider, develop and optimize in order to get the highest possible search engine rankings and they are On-Page and Off-Page SEO. Since On-page SEO is vast and includes a lot of technical moments, large portion of it is categorized under technical SEO umbrella, and we will recognize it as separate type of SEO in this article due to its importance and value for the overall SEO strategy.

On-Page SEO

Search Engine Optimization Strategy Plan

Also called on-site SEO is part of search engine optimization that is under your control and is located directly on your website. Your pages have to be properly optimized in order for Google to crawl and index them, as that is how Google stores your site in its huge database and brings it up on search result screen when user is typing search query related to your website content. If your site has errors, broken links or is missing a site map, it can prevent Google bots from crawling and indexing it, and prevent it to be displayed on search results pages.

Main factors of On-page Optimization:

    • Site hierarchy
    • Integrated keywords
    • Optimization for mobile
    • Site Speed
    • Technical Search Engine Optimization
    • Providing relevant and reliable content

Technical SEO

Technical SEO refers to improving the technical aspects of a website in order to increase the ranking of its pages in the search engines. Making a website faster, easier to crawl and understandable for search engines are the pillars of technical optimization ”(Yoast.com). It focuses on improving elements on your site to get higher search engine rankings. It is a direct opposite of Off-site SEO , which is all about generating awareness for your site though outside channels. Here are the main steps of a quick Technical SEO self-audit and most of the tools needed are available online and are completely free:

Content is King of SEO

  • Identify crawl errors with crawl report
  • Check your sites HTTPS status codes
  • Check XML sitemap status
  • Site loading time
  • Check mobile optimization score
  • Check your sites robots.txt file
  • Audit for keyword cannibalization
  • Perform your google site search
  • Check for duplicate metadata
  • Meta description length
  • Check Site wide duplicate content
  • Check for broken links

Off Page SEO

Also called off-site SEO involves aspects that are outside of your direct control but still have considerable impact on your sites search engine rankings. Off-page SEO is the act of optimizing your business’ online and offline presence through the use of links, relationships, social media, influencer marketing and overall quality content to provide outstanding experience for potential clients and search engine crawl bots. It usually slowly increases your brand search rankings, social media mentions, improves brand awareness and as a result increases traffic to your site, improving leads and conversions and sales.

Main factors of Off-Page Optimization:

      • Backlinks from authority websites
      • Social Media linking and activity
      • Guest blogging
      • Influencer Marketing
      • Positive Reviews and Brand Mentions
      • Blog post articles and Social Media pages shares

Conclusion

The field of search engine optimization is vast and ever changing. There are hundreds of books written about it, many more to come, as SEO is here to stay and evolve. In addition, search engines, like Google, are constantly developing their algorithm to provide the best possible experience for their search users, finding out sites and agencies who are using Blackhat SEO techniques and eliminating them from their search results. This makes it a “fair playing field” for all the competitors to participate and increase their rankings organically. 

In this Blog, we wanted to give you a short overview of Search Engine Optimization. Also go over its types as well as explain ​​how it works. You also learned what elements are directly under your control, and which aspects require gradual building from the outside. External Links, social media interactions, positive reviews are the elements of off-page SEO.

We also wanted to reiterate, that it is never too late to start working on your site’s optimization. It will take time and effort, but will certainly deliver expected results. And increase your chances to be found on the web via search engines. So if you are a business owner and have not invested in your SEO yet, it is time to do it now. You can learn more on how to perform it yourself  here, don’t wait until you are out of business. 

 

Vadym P                                                                                                                                                       1/5/21

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