.What is website SEO? It is a question that gets asked a lot. You may have even only heard the term SEO! The term SEO is an acronym for Search Engine Optimization. That means you optimize the content on your site so search engines like Google, can help it’s users find your site better. By doing so, your SEO efforts can increase your online presence, and in doing that, you can potentially get better results on your website with increased traffic!
SEO Basics
SEO is a very complex thing that keeps evolving over time. At the core of it, Google and all the other search engines, like Bing and Yahoo, just want your site to be clean and easy to read. The process of doing this, or optimizing content, is where it gets fuzzy. There are several factors as to how you show up in a person’s search. Some of these factors are :
- Relevant terms or keyword phrases used in the search – this is important and how Google makes a boatload of money! The better keyword phrases a user uses, the more competitive it is to get to the top (depending on the industry). Hence the more it could cost if you want to appear up top in the advertising section of Google’s top results!
- Location Location Location – Location is huge. If Google or any search engine can detect your location, then it will show a location-based search. If you searched for a StarBucks, it would try and show you the nearest one based on your location. This is because of how Starbucks works with its SEO team to set up different things such as JSON LD and Google My Business to get all their locations listed.
- Your recent search history – Yes this is where it gets spooky! If we continue with the Starbucks search term idea, then the next thing you Google is caramel, Google autocomplete might suggest various coffee drinks such as Caramel Latte!
Knowing some of the basics as listed above, we can start to pick apart how our content might be able to rise to the top. The strategies for optimizing content to get yourself to stand out and rise to the top is what businesses spend a lot of money on. There are several tools such as Moz, SEM Rush, and several others that these companies, including Barhop, utilize to help their clients.
SEO Process
We know some of the basics of how the search engines show results. There also has been some mention of some fancy pants tools that companies use to help get the pages to the top, but how does it all work? There is no easy or short answer but it’s through a series of steps.
- The first step is to go through and make sure the website is good. There is no duplicate content. All the URLs are working correctly. If your site is on WordPress, you are ahead of the curve as WordPress is very SEO friendly and has several plugins like Yoast or All In One SEO that can help.
- After the overall site is good, then its time to talk content. This is where, if possible, you want your web page to have one main thought. This is the keyword phrase that we want to target in on. By doing this, and basing your content around that one central idea or keyword, you’re telling the search engine that this is quality content around this subject and any time that those words are searched, please show my site.
- After you have your keyword phrases and your site set, its time to optimize images and videos. Google and other search engines can search by photo and video (hello YouTube and Google acquiring YouTube! ). To optimize photos, make sure that they have good, quality titles. This means no spaces in the name, and no mix of letters and numbers like it just came off your camera! To give your photo a quality name with spaces, use a – . For example, if your file was named quality photo.jpg, you might consider naming it quality-photo.jpg. In addition to naming, you’ll want to give your photos nice alt tags too. This will help people who can’t see and use screen readers also enjoy your images! You can also do geolocations on both images and video. That way, when the search engines index your media, it can know the location!
- After those steps are done, that the basic setup of SEO! Then comes the fun part of strategizing and continuous research. You will want to see what others are trying to rank for and try to outrank them! That’s where the SEO tools are very helpful. They can help you strategize your content and make it so Google or Bing show your result before your competitor.
The SEO process is not a task to be taken lightly and is a lot of hard work and effort. It is a very time-consuming process and often takes a while (usually 3-6 months) before you can see results.
SEO Extras
In addition to the basic steps from above, there are some extras you can do to help your website SEO with the location search. The extra steps are signing up for Google My Business and implementing JSON + LD. These extra steps send location information to Google. Google then can pick apart your website into different data types. This helps users get information faster!
As you may be able to tell, your website’s SEO is no joke! It is a tall task to overtake. If done properly, it can help search engines like Google, find your site better. By doing so, your SEO efforts can increase your online presence. In doing that, you can potentially get better results on your website with increased traffic!