Search engine optimization, or SEO, is a process that entails ranking a website on Google and other search engines. With good SEO practices, you can optimize your website or web pages to maximize their visibility through high rankings for certain keywords and phrases on search engine results pages (SERPs).
Effective SEO strategies will drive more organic web traffic to your website to complement paid ads and traffic. In turn, your website will benefit from a better online presence and more effectively attract new users or customers.
Not sure how to implement SEO to get the best results? Here is how it works:
Keyword Research
All strong SEO strategies begin with thorough keyword research. This process involves identifying the specific keywords or keyword phrases that people enter when looking for information, products, or services online. Using certain keyword tools, you can find the most relevant and valuable keywords to target with your SEO campaigns, enabling you to optimize your content around them to increase your rankings.
While there is a lot more to SEO than keywords, these elements remain a crucial component of SEO strategies and provide the foundation for them.
On-Page Optimization
One of the main elements you will need for optimizing your website is on-page SEO. This practice requires you to optimize your website directly to improve its performance on search engines.
There are several key components of on-page optimization to consider, including:
- Title Tags: These items are what people will first see in search results in the form of optimized titles. Be sure to write relevant and unique titles that include your targeted keywords.
- Meta Descriptions: The meta description appears beneath the title tag in search results and functions as a compelling summary of page content. These descriptions should also include relevant keywords and briefly describe what the page is about.
- Headings: Web pages often have multiple headings that help break up content into sections. Heading tags include the page's title (H1), along with subheadings such as H2s and H3s, etc. They serve to structure your content and highlight main points and should also feature keywords.
- URL Structure: Descriptive and clean URLs that include relevant keywords can also help your web pages rank.
- Keyword Usage: Keyword instances should appear naturally throughout the web page, but it's important to avoid overstuffing, which can penalize your website.
- Image Optimization: Images can also benefit from SEO. You can optimize images by incorporating keywords into filenames and alt tags that describe the image content.
Off-Page Optimization
You also need good SEO beyond your website on other platforms, which will further boost your website's reputation and authority. The main off-page SEO practice you'll use is link building, which entails getting other high-quality, relevant, and authoritative websites to link back to yours. These links are called backlinks, and they function as a kind of "vote of confidence" for your website. If search engines see that well-established and trusted websites are "vouching" for yours, they'll likely perceive your website as valuable, authoritative, and worth ranking.
Technical SEO
In addition to on-page optimization, your website needs a solid technical foundation to thrive on search engines. These aspects of your site will include mobile-friendliness, page load speed, XML sitemaps, secure HTTPS connections, and the proper use of canonical tags. Together, these elements will supplement all other SEO efforts to make your website appear valuable and trustworthy in the eyes of search engines.
Content Creation
Content is still king, and that concept applies to SEO. Your website needs high-quality, relevant content that brings real value to your audience, which will significantly help with SEO. Your content should address users' unique interests and needs, which will keep people on your pages. When your content engages people, this signals to search engines that your content deserves higher rankings. Engaging, valuable content will also lead people to share links to your site, creating backlinks naturally.
User Experience
Today's search engines also rank websites based on the quality of the user experience they offer. In fact, it is a top priority, making it necessary to optimize elements like mobile responsiveness, page load speed, and navigation to keep users engaged and satisfied. Otherwise, if your website offers a poor experience, not only will your rankings suffer, but the few people who do land on your site will be more likely to turn away before converting.
Search Engine Crawling and Indexing
Search engines use crawlers to sweep across the internet and discover any new or updated content out there. Crawlers are automated bots that help identify content and add it to search engine results in a process called indexing. To ensure your website is crawlable, make sure components of your site like robots.txt files facilitate crawling and indexing. A sitemap is another means of encouraging bots to crawl your website, as they can include contextual information about your site and each page.
Algorithm Updates
Google and other search engines regularly update their algorithms to maximize the relevancy of search results and eliminate spammy ranking tactics. If a website fails to hold up to scrutiny with an update, search engines may penalize it, potentially resulting in significantly decreased rankings or even removal from search engine results. You can avoid penalization by staying up to date on algorithms and maintaining compliance with Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (E-E-A-T) and other practices.
Get Help with Your SEO from the Experts at Mid-West Family
Search engine optimization is an ongoing process that requires some diligence—it's not a "one-and-done" practice. Ranking your website and maintaining those rankings will require consistent effort, measurement, monitoring, and continuous adaptation based on the latest industry trends and algorithm updates. You must also focus on providing valuable content to audiences as much as optimizing for SEO to maximize your website's visibility and gain traffic.
If you need some help with your business's SEO, Mid-West Family Eau Claire is here to be your SEO "hero" alongside our own website company, Webstix. Contact us today to learn more about what we can do to help you secure top rankings in search results.
