A Beginner’s Guide to SEO

Did you know that less than 50% of businesses optimize their digital marketing efforts for SEO? The world of search engine optimization is complex and ever-changing, but understanding the basics with even a small amount of SEO knowledge can make a big difference. 

First, let’s start with some basic terminology

Marketing in general is full of buzzwords, and oftentimes all of the jargon getting thrown around can feel like a different language. We’ve put together a quick glossary for you here:

• SEO - Search engine optimization: the process of making your site better for search engines. Also the job title of a person who does this for a living: We just hired a new SEO to improve our presence on the web.
• SERP - A search engine results page (SERP) is the list of results that a search engine returns in response to a specific word or phrase query.
• Organic Traffic - Visitors that land on your website from unpaid sources. Organic sources here include search engines like Google, Yahoo, or Bing.
• Index - Search engines store all web pages that it knows about in its index. The index entry for each page describes the content and location (URL) of that page. To index is when the search engine fetches a page, reads it, and adds it to the index: Google indexed several pages on my site today.
• Crawl - The process of looking for new or updated web pages. A search engine discovers URLs by following links, by reading sitemaps, and by many other means. Search engines crawl the web, looking for new pages, then indexes them (when appropriate).
• Ranking- This ordering of search results by relevance. When someone performs a search, search engines scour their index for highly relevant content and then orders that content in the hopes of solving the searcher's query.

How Does SEO Work?

Search engines, like Google, are looking for pages that contain high-quality, relevant information about the searcher’s query. They determine relevance by crawling your website’s content and evaluating whether that content is relevant to what the searcher is looking for, mostly based on the keywords it contains. Elements, such as how users engage with your site, site loading speed, and the amount of unique content you have, are being weighed by Google’s algorithm to determine where your site will rank. SEO is important to your organization’s marketing because it connects your website to the correct audience to your site.

Improving Your SEO

A well thought out content strategy is key in improving your website’s SEO. This includes researching and implementing keywords that can help generate organic search traffic.  Keyword research gives insight into the questions, problems, and solutions your target audience is searching for online. This research should be the basis of your SEO efforts, and will help you to construct your content and organic strategies. 

Header tags (H tags) are also very important to your technical SEO. There are different types of headers, ranging from H1 to H6. Each one serves a different purpose, giving search engine crawlers important information about the webpage. The H1 is considered the most important because it essentially acts as the page’s title. Think of this one as being the title of a book. An H1 is a critical ranking factor because it tells the crawlers what a page is about. If the H1 is the title of the book, then the H2 would be its chapters’ titles. You can use H2 subheadings to divide your content into logical sections. H3 through H6 can be used to further organize and clarify your content. They allow you to add more granular details without having a negative impact on the page’s readability by leaving readers to scan through large chunks of text.

Another strategy that will help you gain authority when it comes to site ranking is internal linking. An internal link is simply a hyperlink from one page of your website to another page. While your website navigation is an example of internal linking, we are specifically talking about links on the page in your content. When one page links to another, it passes some of its credibility on to that page, which increases the chances that the second page will rank. This credibility is sometimes called “link juice,” but most search optimizers call it “authority.”

What next?

The best part of a well informed SEO strategy is that it is essentially free marketing. There are dozens of additional strategies, such as improving your website’s core web vitals, that can be implemented to help increase your organic website traffic. If you are interested in learning how these strategies could work for you, please feel free to reach out to our Consulting and Support team today!