With inbound marketing techniques on the rise, you may have heard about utilizing SEO. What is SEO, anyway? Is it really as beneficial as people say? Here are 5 common questions that people ask about SEO.
1. What is SEO?
SEO stands for search engine optimization. In short, it’s the process of getting traffic from search results on search engines. SEO helps your website come up more frequently in potential customers’ search engines so that they can get to your site faster. SEO optimizes a website so that it meets the criteria of search engines, making your site listed higher on those search engines.
Not only does SEO help increase your web traffic, but it allows for more quality web traffic. You won’t just get more visitors to your site, you’ll get a higher percentage of visitors that become customers. SEO helps you target your content at key audiences so that it reaches your potential customers.
2. How does it work?
SEO is the process of making sure that the content on your site matches the criteria of search engines. Search engines consider a few different categories. First, they consider the words in your content, making sure that the words in your content match whatever a person has searched for. The titles of your content matter too. Titles often summarize the page, which helps the search engine rank the content from different sites by relevance.
Search engines also consider the links between different sites. When one site links to another, the search engine considers it a recommendation. Sites with lots of recommendations rank higher and are considered good sights. If more trustworthy sites have links to your content, your site will be linked even higher because trustworthiness of a site plays a role as well. The words within the links matter, too. For example, if you say “Chegg has textbooks” and the word textbooks has a link to chegg.com, the search engine will be able to associate Chegg with textbooks.
Lastly, search engines consider reputation. The quality of your content is important, as is the frequency of new content. When a site has a lot of high quality new content, it is ranked higher in a search engine. Read below to understand what a search engine determines as quality content.
3. What are some important features my site should have?
The most important feature your content should have is quality. Your content should be engaging to make sure people are staying on your sight and reading your content instead of just clicking through. The information should be verifiable and include links to trusted sites. The quality of the content on your site is a big factor for search engines.
In addition to producing quality content, you should be constantly adding new content featuring fresh and popular topics. Fresh content is an important factor for search engines. You should also make sure you’re incorporating key words that are being searched for. Inclusion of vertical content such as images, news, and videos is important as well because it will help your content come up in more pointed searches.
The architecture of your content as important as the content itself. Your page should be able to load quickly and well. If pictures take a long time to load, people are less likely to read your content because they won’t want to wait. Consider using file compression sites to help shrink the size of files to make them load quicker. Another aspect to consider is whether your site is mobile-friendly. If your site is easy to access from mobile devices, it is more likely to come up in mobile searches.
4. How important are Meta descriptions?
Meta descriptions, or those blurbs that come up in a search engine underneath the link to your site, are very important. You should not worry about including keywords in your Meta description because the search engine will look for keywords throughout your content. However, you should make your Meta description compelling so that a potential customer wants to click on your site. Your Meta description is the hook that pulls people into your site.
5. What kind of results should I expect from utilizing SEO?
SEO isn’t just about getting more traffic to your site. When used properly, you should expect to get more quality traffic for your business. Visitors to your site will be more likely to be potential customers than people who randomly clicked on your site. SEO is a long-term commitment. You should expect to wait 2-3 months before seeing key phrases in top 30 listings of search engines. However, over time SEO will greatly increase quality traffic to your site and result in more business.