MIKALA MORGAN

Ahhh, SEO. Those three little letters have been around for quite some time in the tech & marketing industry but is now taking the world by storm as more businesses are starting to realize the need for optimizing their online presence, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic.

So, what exactly is SEO?

SEO stands for search engine optimization and it means exactly that: optimizing websites to rank better for search engines.

The main goal of every search engine is to create the best possible user experience based on the user’s search terms. Meaning, the more relevant, informative and useful user experience that your website creates, the better the chances that search engines will serve your pages.

Although the algorithms used by search engines are updated frequently, there are some SEO practices that you can implement to continually increase your search engine results page (SERPs) position:

• Keywords
  • Do your research to see what your target audience is searching for online and then utilize those search terms in your content both on the front and backend of your site.
  • Include keywords in your page title tags, meta titles and meta descriptions. For more tips on the technical side, click here. 
• Site Structure
  • Make sure that your sitemap is up to date and easy for search engines to index. The more structured your site is, the better it is for search engines to find and index pages.
  • Properly structure your URLs. When publishing posts and pages to a site, the URL is often a default string of letters and numbers, by customizing your URLs to include relevant keywords it helps search engines decipher what the topic of your content is.
• Links
  • Linking internally to other pages on your site is another way to help search engines index your site, as well as providing users with more relevant information.
  • You should also reference and link to other sites online (outbound links). On the Internet sharing is caring and linking to other reputable site helps to build your own credibility.
• Site speed
  • Search engines (and users) do NOT like slow pages. Try minimizing your media, plugins, etc. to speed up your site to be as fast as possible. You can test your current site speed using Google’s PageInsights tool.
• Content Marketing
  • I’ve talked about this in my blog post, 4 Digital Marketing Tips for Your Business in 2020, but content is KING! Do your research and plan out content that will provide the answers to the questions that your target audience is searching for.
  • Once you plan out your content, strategize the best way to market it online.

Bottom line: Most users will not even make it to the second page of Google when searching for something online. Now more than ever, you need to ensure that you are doing everything possible to push your site to the top of the rankings.