Blog For Noob Random thought of a Noob Blogger
Search engine optimization, or SEO, is a highly vital digital marketing practice for any online business in 2021. When done correctly, it is one of the best tools to help you organically attract customers and increase your online presence. This guide is here to help you understand the basics of SEO in 2021.
What is Search Engine Optimization?
SEO is the practice of increasing the quantity of traffic through to your website by getting people to click through search engine results – this increases the quality of traffic as well. It helps to increase both quality and quantity in three unique ways:
- When a search engine like Google tells its users that you are a good website to get their information from, the quality of your traffic will increase as you will get visitors that trust your website and are genuinely interested in what you have to say and the products that you have to offer.
- When you are positioned high up on a search engine results page for specific relevant keywords, you will get more traffic.
- Ads make up a lot of search engine results pages; by using SEO, you are getting organic, non-paid results.
How Does SEO Work?
Search engines like Google, DuckDuckGo, and Bing are constantly crawling websites to determine the quality of your site. Made by factory explains more about search engine crawling, revealing that some websites are crawled daily while others only every few months. Search engines look to see how useful and relevant your page is and then to see what value your page can add to their users. For example, they will look at your page’s loading speeds because they know that 53% of people will click off a site if it takes more than three seconds to load. They also evaluate how trustworthy your site is – this can be determined by a range of factors, such as how many backlinks (other sites linking to your site) you have.
How To Improve On-Site SEO
There are many factors that go into improving your website’s SEO:
- Keywords – identify and target specific keywords and phrases that are relevant to your site and target audience to rank higher in a specific category.
- Content – update content regularly to ensure your site stays relevant.
- Metadata – this is important as it is a sign to search engine bots – it describes what your content is about.
- Loading speeds – no matter how successful your other practices are, their impact will be limited if you don’t improve loading speeds.
- Improve dwelling times – if your site has lots of users that quickly bounce from the site, this is factored in by search engines and limits your ranking potential. You need users that stay on your site, as this indicates they get value from it.
- Include a site map – search engines need to be able to understand how to navigate your site in order to recommend high ranking. Therefore, you need to include a site map.
- Optimize for voice search – more voice searches are happening, and this trend is only set to continue in years to come. To optimize for voice search, start including more long tail keywords.
