What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?
SEO takes the technical and creative elements of a website and focuses on making them play nice with search engines. SEO is the process of optimizing your online content so that a search engine will deem it valuable and display it near the top of a search result page (SERP). There are many characteristics of SEO, from the actual content of your site, to the way other sites link to you on their site, making sure your images have alt tags, etc.
SEO analysis tools allow users to examine how they might improve a website’s ranking on search engines like Google and Bing. Search engines are the primary method of navigation for most Internet users. Even though social media and other types of traffic can generate visits to your website, if search engines cannot find your site, you will miss out on incredible opportunities to drive traffic to your website. The world of SEO is complex; however, with some research, most people can understand the basics. In this post, we’re here to help you understand why it is important that your site is friendly with search engines and demonstrate the value of taking the time to do so.
Why is this important?
The fact of the matter is that the first five results on Google get 67% of all clicks—this is why search engine optimization is so important. Even a small amount of knowledge can make a big difference. With an SEO analysis, you can find out which aspects of your SEO strategy are working and what your biggest obstacles are, which is preventing you from improving your site ranking.
Improving your SEO
The overall goal of SEO is to get traffic and, ultimately, conversions on your website. It will likely take a bit of trial and error to come up with the correct combination of content, keywords, and layout that will produce the desired results in maximizing website traffic and ROI.
Backlinks, also called "inbound links" or "incoming links," are created when one website links to another. In some cases, you might want to link to well-established websites. Backlinks are a well-established part of SEO and most companies want to get a good number of them, as they help increase rankings and build authority. Backlinks are especially valuable for SEO because they represent a confidence between sites. Here are a few tips on how you can improve your site traffic with backlinks. Good backlinks have a technically optimized site, a strong site architecture, and have valuable content.
Some backlinks are inherently more valuable than others. If you are not careful, you can get penalized by getting too many links to your site from poor-quality sites. Poor-quality websites knowingly feature links to low-quality, malicious, spamming websites, and are at risk of getting penalized by Google. Here are some technical issues you need to look out for: site loading time, mobile friendliness, duplicate content, 302 redirects, redirect chains, 404 errors, canonical errors, duplicate metadata, incorrect uses of directives, etc. Google has a number of useful tools for users, including PageSpeed Insights, Mobile Friendly check, and Webmasters Tools.
Enhancing your site’s URL structure is a key, also: your URLs should be short, without long complicated strings of numbers. Short, simple, and easily remembered. Your pages should have targeted keywords and be specific about the content of that webpage.
What to look out for
Some people are always on the lookout for shortcuts, and there are hundreds of pages out there that will promise you "tricks" to quickly improving their site rank without doing any work. These tricks include things like keyword stuffing, sneaky redirects, poor quality content, invisible keywords, link farms, etc., and these techniques are referred to as Black Hat SEO. Black Hat SEO is a type of SEO that focuses only on building site content for the search engine, not the user. Trust us when we tell you that not only will these practices not improve your ranking, but will actually hurt your ranking. Google built its service to help people, so when they crawl a site that is using deceptive techniques to get clicks, they penalize their ranking or ban the site altogether. If you want to rank well, build your site for people, not search engines.
Conclusion
Search Engine Optimization is important for many reasons and it changes all the time. SEO analysis tools help people to study how their website is ranking on search engines, but you have to put in the time to learn how to use these tools effectively. Don't have the time? Not to worry, Armor has a whole internet marketing department dedicated to maintaining and updating our clients' SEO. Contact us today, and let the Armor Techs take care of your SEO for you.