by Moriah Powell
What is SEO? SEO stands for “search engine optimization”. What does that mean exactly? It means taking your website and cultivating it so that search engines like Google, Bing, and Safari will select your website for products and services that consumers are searching for higher in rank than other websites in an online search.
Optimizing your website improves your visibility in search results. Search engines collect information by sifting through sites collecting data about these pages and putting them into a library. This library has all the information you’re looking for at any point in time. By searching the index of this library you can find exactly what you’re looking for.
Algorithms. Algorithms go through the libraries index and determine which pages should appear at the top of the search results. This library has assessed every website to give you exact answers to your questions. However, even though you can pay for ads, you cannot pay for your website to get higher organic search rankings. This is where the importance of understanding SEO becomes critical.
SEO is important because consumers are searching for answers using search engines daily. So it is imperative to make sure your site is SEO friendly. You can do this by making sure your page has high-quality content, this will ensure a lower bounce back rate. When a person clicks on a link to your website and goes back to the search engine, it's called a bounce back. This means your site did not have the information they needed and they went back to the search engine to find another site.
Another way is to make sure your site has a great loading speed and is mobile-friendly. Consumers are more likely to bounce back to the search engine if the site is taking too long to load. It is also deterring if your website layout does not function well on mobile screens.
Lastly, keyword plugging. This starts by identifying the keywords that people are searching for that you can place on-page of your website that will increase the chances of ranking higher in search engines. Keyword plugging must not be forced. This means in the text of your pages, you incorporate keywords that flow with your copy (written material). Some keywords are more challenging to rank for than others because competitors are already ranking for them. Spend time looking for high-volume keywords that your competitors are not currently ranking for.
Now that you know how to optimize your site, it’s time to create pages that your audience needs and search engines adore.