SEO Acronym – SEO For Beginners

Introduction to SEO (What does the SEO acronym stand for?

A huge chunk of digital marketing or online marketing is SEO also known as search engine optimization. It is an organic way to drive traffic to your website and other pages you want them to view. SEO in basic terms is the process of optimizing your website, backlinks, and other variables to increase your ranking capabilities on google, safari or any other search engine. It is split into two categories, on-site SEO and off-site SEO. It may take time but when done correctly you can easily start to rank for keywords that relate to your small business. 

On-Site SEO

The first of SEO and the part that you have complete control over is your on-site SEO. This is optimizing pages of your website so that they rank for the keywords you choose. There are different tricks to optimizing your pages but the main thing to focus on is using your keywords in lots of different ways. What I mean by this is in your context and images. The other way to optimize your website is to make your page very readable and easy to “take-in” for your users. This will make people want to stay longer which will let google know that your site is a good site that people will love.

Keywords In Your Context

You first need to understand what I mean by context. Context is the words or text on the pages of your website including the title, headers and all the text that is in your paragraphs. In order to do SEO in your context you need to know the main keyword you are trying to rank for along with 3-5 sub keywords that relate to your main keyword. Once you know the words you are going to target, you need to place them in your writing anywhere between 7-11 times. Some places that are most recommended to place your keywords are in your title, headers, and subheaders. Google looks at these parts of your context as your most important and will cause your page to show up for the words that match the users search. After making sure that your keywords are in your title, headers, and subheaders, you need to make sure that you include however many you left, before you hit the 7-11 mark, in the body of your pages. Make sure that you don’t overdo it. When you add your keyword into your context too many times, google will penalize you for over-optimization. In other words, it will cause you to lose “points” towards ranking higher.

Keywords In Your Images

When you use images on your website it is a great opportunity to include keywords into your site. Once the images are on your website there is something called “alt-text” which is where you can include these keywords. To find the option for alt-text, click on your image and look for a section that says alt-text. The alt-text tells google what the image is about. When you put your keyword into the alt-text it will not only help for your page link to show up first, it will also allow for that exact image to show up in the images tab in google. This will increase brand awareness when people see your image while optimizing your site and it is one of the easiest ways to do on-site SEO.

Off-Site SEO

The second part of SEO for your website is off-site SEO. This part of optimization is the hardest one to do because not everything is in your control. Although you don’t have complete control over your off-site SEO, that is no excuse for not having it optimized. This half of SEO is the most effective half because of the difficulty of actually optimizing. When I talk about optimizing the off-site part of your website, I’m talking about backlinks. Backlinks are links to your website that are on other peoples websites. The reason that they are so difficult to get is because other people have to be the ones to put your link on their site and in turn create a backlink. There are important steps when looking over your backlinks and making sure that they are all healthy links that you are glad to have.

Optimizing Backlinks

When you look at the backlinks that are hooked to your website, you want to make sure that first of all the links are not from toxic sites that you do not want to be linked with. This doesn’t mean low authority sights. I am talking about sights that are computer made or sights that include inappropriate content. Once you have made sure that all the sites that you are linked to through backlinks are clean, you want to make sure that the sites are using keywords that you are wanting to rank for in the text part of the link. If it is a picture you want to make sure that the alt text is keywords that relate to your business. This will help google know that the website (your website) that is hooked to that link is also hooked to the keywords that are in the text part of the link. If the text is not optimized, reach out to the company and ask them to do so. Don’t be afraid of talking to people and make sure that your backlinks are optimized. 

Obtaining Backlinks

The trick to obtaining backlinks is being persistent. Before you attempt to try and obtain a backlink, you need to look for sites that use your same keywords, aren’t competitors, and have a high authority score. When they use the same keywords as you, google links your website to those same keywords. You want to make sure they aren’t a competitor because if they were, it would be near impossible to get a backlink because they don’t want to help you. The last thing, making sure they have a high authority score, is to give your website a boost in authority score. The higher the authority score of the companies, the higher your website authority score will go up. If you link with a site that has a lower authority score, don’t worry because this will not drag your authority score down. The only way you can go is up!

Conclusion

SEO when done right can be the difference between success and failure. It should be a constant thing that your company works on and is a process that takes time. Although it can be hard and take a lot of time, don’t give up, it is worth it in the end for the organic traffic that it will bring to your site.