26 Jun SEO Essentials You Must Learn to Start Right
If you don’t have a clue about SEO and you’ve just recently learned about it, but you understand that you will be needing it, then learning more about this subject is essential. This not an area where you can wander alone, without any knowledge and hope to learn as you go, because early mistakes in SEO can be quite costly and fixing them might require a lot of time and effort.
In this post, I will talk about the fundamentals of SEO that will help you get good starting knowledge, which you can later use to successfully market your organization, no matter what it’s nature is or what industry you are in. If you plan on creating a strong online presence, then it’s essential to learn more about SEO, as it can make or break your online efforts.
SEO is a discipline that is dynamic and it changes often, the rules are never static, so don’t be surprised if in a year from now, some of the things I will talk about today no longer stand. However, I will mostly focus on the things that haven’t changed often in the past and are likely to remain the same in the future. Still, if you want to be up-to-date, you should always look to read and learn more.
What is this famous “SEO?”
The acronym SEO stands for search engine optimization. This is a marketing technique which has been widely adopted over the web by both marketers, influencers, companies and other organizations that need to rely on their visibility online to get the results they want. To be more specific, the core of their online presence is their website, and improving its SEO means that it will get more organic traffic. But what does all of this really mean?
Organic traffic are people who come to your site through web searches. They don’t see any ads that lead them to your site, but instead your site appears in their searches on search engines and they click on it. When a person types certain words in the search bar, those websites which have the best SEO keyword optimization for those keywords will appear at the top of the search results pages.
This means that the chance of someone landing on your site naturally are far greater. There are various paid ad methods where you can push traffic to your site, but this will not make your site stable and you will have to spend a lot of money to get traffic constantly. On top of that, the chance of those people performing some action on your website are significantly lower.
SEO optimized website that has been worked on over a period of time is also more stable, your site will not disappear when you stop doing direct actions that support your SEO and your site will remain visible for a long time.
This marketing technique combines both creative skills and technical skills in order to improve website ranking, drive traffic, increase domain authority, and generally promote an organization around the web. With good optimization and a long campaign, a website can grow on its own and bring great results, even when the SEO efforts stop, and keep a business stable for a long time.
“Google” is the one who is in charge of all the rules that surround SEO and they are the ones that make changes and rank sites. They change their algorithms based on which sites are ranked every couple of years and this is why keeping yourself updated is essential if you want your SEO strategy to remain effective.
SEO revolves around many things, including keywords, content quality, linking, and the tagging strategy that’s being used while optimizing a website. If you are able to perform well all-around, you can guarantee that search engines will recognize your work and that Google’s algorithm will rank you fairly.
Reasons why you need an SEO strategy
Most of the traffic that a website can attract today comes from various search engines. Some of these include Bing, Mozilla, Yahoo, Google etc. Despite the fact that there is an opportunity for driving traffic through social media, most of the web traffic that websites create comes directly through searches.
Simply put, people mostly click on websites they discover when searching for something in their web browser and this is how their web research works. The same trend applies to all websites, no matter if they represent a single person, a whole business organization, non-profit organization, or an educational institution. On top of that, websites can acquire more visitors through targeted searches and this brings a lot of value.
When a certain site is optimized for some keywords that are related to the content, services or products that the site offers to people who find it through organic search will be important visitors that genuinely have interest in what the site has to offer. This means that there are higher chances of conversion and someone making an action while on your site.
On the other hand, if your website is optimized for keywords which have nothing to do with its content, you will be able to attract organic traffic, but it will not be meaningful, given the fact that your site is not related to your optimization whatsoever. People will simply end up confused and go somewhere else to find what they are looking for.
Simply put, when web users type searches in their browser, they are also typing search queries that are highly valuable when talking about SEO. In the long history of online business and marketing there is solid proof that organic traffic that high SEO ranking provides can be very valuable and bring direct profit and exposure to organizations. The return of investment for this type of marketing is quite higher than other marketing techniques and this is a clear indicator of how valuable SEO is.
Why do websites without SEO get ruled out?
Search engines are complex things and there is serious programming behind them. There is a huge amount of content that gets uploaded online on a regular basis and it is so big that search engines need help to provide people the right content they are looking for.
All of those web browsers mentioned before constantly crawl the web and get updated regularly so that they can be efficient at finding the right information for the right users. This is how they are able to work properly and get better results, but there are still limitations. A well optimized website with an ongoing SEO campaign has the potential to drive hundreds or thousands of new visitors every day.
However, when you make mistakes in your SEO strategy, it’s possible to bury a website so deep that repairing the damages can be a long and costly process, just to be back at square one. When it comes to business, you have to put in a lot of effort to stay relevant online and a proper SEO strategy can provide your business with great benefits such as new leads, readers, community, sales etc.
The reason for this is that Google wants order online, and it expects businesses and other organizations to put in an effort if they want to be visible. Google doesn’t want to be tricked by anyone and people who tried this got their sites penalized so hard that they were never able to recover from it.
Is it possible to learn how to do SEO by yourself?
SEO marketing and optimization can be quite complex, however, if you put in enough effort, you will be able to do it solidly over time. By acquiring just the basic SEO knowledge, you will be able to improve the ranking of your site slowly. On top of that, there is a lot of valuable information about SEO you can find online from experts who do this for a living.
For many people who now do SEO for a living and create whole campaigns, their career started this way. All of them started learning from the basics, and over the years they improved their skills and found their way into marketing, where they were able to make a living. It’s possible to do SEO on your own from scratch, but you will have to create a solid plan and be determined to stick with it.
Doing some basic SEO can get you solid results and you will be able to rank a website so that it starts generating organic traffic. However, if you have need for advanced strategies and you don’t have the understanding to perform them, it’s better to find someone who does this professionally and pay for quality SEO services.
If not, you will spend a lot of time trying to figure out what to do and in the end you will probably do the wrong things that will only create negative results. Figuring out the right strategy needed for a certain website is a complex analytic process and it requires a lot of knowledge. Figuring out what needs fixing in order to get the best results can be difficult, but acting quickly is crucial to minimize the damages and start repairing everything.
However, if you don’t have the time to do all of this by yourself, you can hire a digital marketing agency that has a lot of specialists and writers who will be able to do this better and, more importantly, they will be able to get the necessary results much quicker.
UX and SEO are now closely tied together
As I’ve said before, Google likes to change algorithms every couple of years. One of the most recent changes they’ve made revolves around ranking sites, based on the user experience they provide to their visitors and to make sure that people do, in fact, land on a site that is relevant to them when they enter certain keywords into a search engine.
Simply put, if a person is looking for scientific work, relevant websites that contain valid studies or research need to pop up on the first page of their search results. When a person opens a site on the first page of the search results, finds the right topic and sees that there is plenty of quality content that interests them, it’s called a good user experience. On top of that, the quality of the content itself is becoming an increasingly important factor.
Websites that produce honest, relevant, original, and digestible content that has valuable and fresh information will be ranked better than those who are misleading or offer false information. In the past, SEO was all about keywords, but now user experience is also very important, including website design, images, videos, content etc. Because of this, people can no longer trick Google and spam keywords instead of giving relevant, quality experience to users.
On top of that, in the past people used to stack short blog posts filled with keywords and improve the speed of their campaign. However, the most effective blog posts now, apart from being well-written and relevant, need to be around 1500 words and include good formatting, bullets, images, videos and quality links. These are some of the most important changes in SEO, and many marketers and businesses had to change their strategies drastically.
These are the fundamentals of SEO you must learn and comprehend before you start doing anything to optimize your website. There is a lot more to learn, and you will have to put in a lot of work and time into developing your marketing skills. Don’t be discouraged, when you learn important things you will have no problem creating campaigns and making good results. Good luck!
