All About SEO

Whether searching for a new car, a place to go for date night or simply how to fix a leaky faucet, you’re likely to click on one of the first five links that pop up on your screen. We trust Google, or whatever search engine we’re using, to give us perfect, reliable websites that will answer our questions and show us what we’re looking for in a matter of milliseconds.

This is where you find SEO—Search Engine Optimization. SEO can help a website display higher in ranking on search engines—like Google—to increase organic traffic visiting the site. The main goals of SEO are to ensure websites are high-quality, understandable for search engines and useful for users. With a lot of moving parts, it can seem complicated. Here are a few basic tips and tricks behind making a high-quality, high-performing website using proper SEO.

Main Components

On-Site Content

What is on a website is, of course, one of the biggest influencers in SEO. Search engines assess and rate page content to affirm the reliability and quality for users. Search engines like Google want to be sure the results they bring to users answer their questions and deliver to their needs.

On-Site Structures

Behind the scenes is the technical SEO. This encompasses how a site runs and how effective it will be when users visit it. Areas to measure effectiveness include crawlability, page speed, coding, links, security, mobile usage and more.

Off-Site

Just like with public relations, links and references from other websites can have an impact on a website’s ranking. If a page is linked to from other high-quality, relevant sources, it is given more respect and trust from the search engine, upping its rank in results.

Techniques

Keywords

Researching keywords is a major part of SEO. This means figuring out what search terms potential customers use and what terms can be put into the site to appear in SERPs, or Search Engine Result Pages. This process provides perspective on how to create and use a website’s content to influence how the website will work on the search engine.

Content

Content also makes or breaks a website’s SERP ranking. The content on a website should be geared towards creating a personalized experience for users and answering their questions. Creating an attractive and appealing website can grant a higher ranking from search engines, bettering the SEO.

Positive User Experience

As we all know, a website should never be a maze. Users should be able to journey through a website easily and enjoyably. Structuring and coding a website should be done with the mindset of creating the best user experience. This will influence how the users interact with each page and determine if they’ll come back again.

Auditing and Optimization

Finally, to maintain an effective website and stay up to date on SEO, your company should perform auditing and optimizations for the site. An audit points out weaker areas of the site and how to  improve performance in search engines, thus gaining more organic traffic. Similarly, conversion rate optimization measures how changes to a website influence the conversion rate, looking at not just the site’s traffic, but actions taken by the user. This is where organic performance can lead to a growing business.

Overall, SEO focuses on the organic traffic a website brings and the ranking it receives from search engines. Higher rankings lead to more organic traffic and more organic traffic leads to more organic performance, which means more business. Sounds easy, right?

Not so much.

SEO can be complicated and difficult to master in a day. It’s an ongoing activity and dynamic practice for businesses. Here at Asher, we help with creating and maintaining a well-operating website, ensuring SEO is always accounted for. Contact us today to help with your company’s marketing needs!