What is SEO?
SEO means “Search Engine Optimization” or “Search Engine Marketing” and takes the number eight position in our countdown to Online Enterprise success. It’s the process of trying to get your website to show up in the search results for Google, Ask, Bing, Yahoo, and other search engines. A lot of SEO companies make it difficult to understand but we’ve decided to explain things on much simpler terms. In a nutshell, SEO defined by two practices: optimizing webpages by improving content on your own website (AKA “On-Page SEO”) and building links that point to your website from other sites (AKA “Off-Page SEO”). There are highly-specialized campaigns, and more broad approaches. Optimizing a website for search engines require analyzing so many unique elements that many Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Specialists consider themselves to be in the broad field of website optimization (since so many of those elements intertwine).
Keyword Research is Crucial for SEO
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a simple process but one that’s challenging to execute well. We’re going to walk you through the fundamentals of SEO to get your webpages into the search engines, and give them the ability to rank as well as they possibly can. First, the foundation of SEO begins with Keyword Research and Targeting. Keyword research and targeting is tricky because not only is it necessary to produce the content and make it accessible to search engines, but it’s also necessary to target words that people are actually searching for. Targeting the words that people are searching for involves using keywords tools. Keyword tools allow SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Specialists to see expanded forms of the keyword in question. Data can be collected about the keyword such as: alternative forms of the word, search trends, exact phrases or broad terms, times people are searching for the word, and much more.
SEO Overview
- Helps you show up in searches
- AKA “Search Marketing”
- 2 types of SEO: On-Page & Off-Page
- Off-Page SEO = “backlinking”
- On-Page SEO = keywords in your site
- Blogging effects SEO
- Guest-blogging is key to success
- Content and Accessibility
- Off-Page SEO (Backlinking)
- Website Hierarchy (On-Page SEO)
- Social Media Marketing (SMM)
If you don’t have content on your website, search engines don’t have anything to index. Content is: text, video, audio and/or images that are all associated with text. So if the Google robots cannot access all of your pages, or the content on those pages don’t appear by default, or if there’s some type of coding error, search engines will not index your content; therefore, it’s really important to make your website’s content accessible to search engines. Have you ever visited a website and noticed that the pages seemed empty? Well guess what, search engines notice this too. The more content you have on your website, the better your chances are for getting major search engines like Google to index your information (for example “Asheville SEO“) and send that content to users who are trying to find out more about the subject you’re an expert in. Content is king, although pictures are great, content is what keeps people coming back to your site.
Once we’ve performed keyword research, built quality content and made it accessible to search engines, put those keywords on the pages in the right kinds of ways, we’re ready to build your link popularity. Link popularity is also called “backlinking” and/or Off-Page SEO. Backlinks become extremely important when trying to compete for high-ranking keywords such as “shoes”. Backlinks are often the catalyst that push your website over the “SEO edge” and get you to the top of the search results. Backlinking is the practice of other websites linking to your website. In fact, some Asheville SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Specialists refer to it as “an online referral”. Search engines see this “referral” as a testimony to your authority in the subject in which you’re an expert. The great thing about backlinking is that if a site links to you that has major authority, that is worth more than someone with no authority. In other words, you need quality backlinks.
After generating backlinks and performing Off-Page SEO for your online enterprise, the next step is to organize your content in such a way that search engine spiders and robots love to crawl. We call this “spider food”. That said, keyword usage and targeting are only a small part of the search engines’ ranking algorithms, and we can still leverage some effective “best practices” for keyword usage to help make pages that are very close to “optimized.” Here at Orthodox Daily, we engage in a lot of testing and get to see a huge number of search results and shifts based on keyword usage tactics. There are a huge number of techniques and tricks that we use in order to properly optimize your company’s website for search engines. For example, “Asheville SEO (Search Engine Optimization)” can be targeted by Asheville SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Companies that want to rank for that term.
The last piece in the Pyramid of SEO, and by extension, the last piece of the puzzle, is the smallest; it is Social Media signals. Google and Bing (Microsoft) both have made deals with services like Twitter, and Microsoft has an investment in Facebook, which may give them access to data about Social Media search trends. This means that as time goes on, Social Media Marketing (SMM) will become ever more-important when optimizing a website as social data is distributed to these major search engines. Information about the social search trends like: what’s popular, who “likes” what, who does not “like” something, who is giving a thumbs-up on StumbleUpon, who is sharing with their Fans on Facebook and who’s Tweeting. Those signals are make their way into the search engines. We’re still in the early stages of how search engines use this data but in the future it’s critical to make sure that you’re doing great Asheville SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and making your website valuable.
