What is SEO?
SEO, according to the famous Wikipedia, can be defined as the process of affecting the visibility of a website or a webpage in a search engine’s unpaid results. Okay…so what does that mean?
Well, it basically can be understood as the process of optimizing your content (online content) so that any search engine will show it at the top of the given list of search results after a user inputs a certain keyword or keywords.
You see, if a person or user is searching for, let’s say, handcrafted jewelry, you’d want the search engine to show (this is if what your website provides is content concerning handcrafted jewelry) it as a top result to the searcher.
We’ll focus more on Google as a search engine because 75% of internet users use Google. So, to make Google put/rank your website at the top of the search results, SEO is that tool that you use to make that happen whenever a user searches for a keyword (e.g. handcrafted jewelry).
Did you know that 67% of the first five results on Google all get clicked on? Now imagine your website ranked in the top five, imagine the amount of traffic you’d be getting; now you’re starting to see why SEO is important?
If your website doesn’t appear on the first page of a Google search, that is equal to your page not ranking at all. Hiring an SEO Agency is one of the fastest and safest ways to get ranked on Search Engines.
Must Read: Questions To Ask Before Hiring an SEO Agency
There are three SEO categories, and they are:
- On-page SEO, and
- Off-page SEO, and
- Technical SEO
On-page SEO is concerned with all of Google’s ranking factors that are determined by looking at the selected page for optimization, such as, content, page structure, and your headlines.
Off-page SEO, on the other hand, refers to variable Google looks at; these aren’t in your hands exclusively. It can be defined as the number and quality of websites that are linking to your content. Google and other search engines want to show search results from authoritative pages mostly and one of the ways they determine who is authoritative and who isn’t is the number of backlinks pointing to your site.
To get your SEO right, you need to know how to use both. If your page is optimized well on-page wise and you have little or no authoritative site pointing to your site, you might not get the desired search engine traffic.
If you have a visitor visit your site after only viewing just one page, Google considers that a bounce. The more bounce rates you have, the worse your rankings on Google will become. This is why the on-page and off-page SEO are vital.
For your on-page SEO, you need to focus on creating great content. “Content is King,” and in relation to SEO, no truer words have been said.
When a user puts in a set of keywords, Google provides to the user what it believes are the best resources for that user to get informed on the search topic. Google gives to the user (well, it tries to) the best experience by steering the user to good content. Who doesn’t want a satiated customer, right? So your job is to provide Google with great contents so that your website can be referred to the user.
How To Write Great Content
The first and most crucial part of writing great SEO contents is keyword research. Keyword research can be defined as the art of putting together all the keywords you want the ”Content” you want to write on to be triggered with on search engines.
While choosing keywords, it is advisable that you choose keywords with a reasonable search volume ( number of times a word is searched for on google). One easy way to do this is by using Google AdWords’ keyword planner or keyword everywhere chrome extension.
You naturally would want to include specific keywords in your posts’ headlines, and in every part of your article (where necessary). You’d need to figure out the keywords before you get down to writing. This is one facet of SEO that you should be very particular about.
Search engines have grown over the years, and have gotten better and smarter. While it is important that you use your keywords throughout your articles, inundating them with keywords would hurt more than help them.
SO, DO NOT FILL YOUR ARTICLE WITH THESE KEYWORDS!! Google only needs to understand a set of words and know what they mean to provide the user with a variation or synonym. So your keyword would definitely have a synonym that’ll be used by Google to deliver to a user in a search query.
Other facets are:
The freshness of contents
Post new contents, and be eyed by Google. You can rewrite old posts, but all you need to do is make them feel fresh, and you’re good to go. You don’t necessarily have to post daily (not that that is bad), but you can still post once in a month and you’re still good to go, as long as you have a thoroughly thought-out content.
Direct answers
If your content is written clearly enough for Google to easily understand, and recognize as the answer to a particular searched question, it will automatically show up beneath the search bar. So, clean up your writing! Leave the fancy words, and complex sentence structures, because these won’t help your SEO in any way.
I hope after reading this, you’ll take your time to get your SEO right!
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