What is SEO?
SEO stands for search engine optimization and is about how your content exists within the search results. Its main focus is about improving your content, so that you can improve your placement and then your reach.
Having a good placement in the search results is a desirable outcome and therefore it is important to include SEO in the creation of the content on your website. Unlike SEM, search engine marketing, which is paid way to get your content at the top of the search results, SEO is a natural and technical process, that doesn’t inherently cost money. It can be a very cheap way of getting word about your website out.
It will take effort to improve your SEO as it requires improving or changing your content to do so.
Good content for SEO isn’t necessarily good content for your design or functionality, but they aren’t opposites either. The best content for SEO isn’t always the best for the design but SEO isn’t always more important than the design. It is about finding a way a balance between the two.
The parameters that SEO looks into are often focused on keywords, repetition, links and more in that genre. This isn’t always the best in your design. But a site with a beautiful and functional design will bring up your ranking in other ways as a site users enjoy using and becomes popular in that aspect will help you. SEO does give more space for popular and regularly used websites.
What use is good SEO?
We have touched a little on why SEO is so important in the section above, but there are many reasons to improve SEO. Higher rankings will make your placement in the search higher. This will make it more likely that people will see it as most people tend to choose the first couple of results in a search.
SEO can help you get a small in for things that might never have lead people before if you can optimize it to really push some parts of your content and get people in on your site. This might make them consume more of your content and website.
Good SEO also gives you the possibility to link all of your presences on different platforms together, which is a good way to show all the different parts of your brand and direct people to your different content.
What are some of the ways to improve?
SEO is not a onetime thing that is just done and then you move on. It is an ongoing process that will probably require continued work as you continue to make content or need to improve it as the tendencies of the web changes.
It will take a lot more work to optimize your website in the begin as you most likely start from zero and need to build the foundation. As your continue optimizing later on it will be easier to change just a few things or go through what you already have.
There is a lot of help to get out there to take some of the burden off of you. There are services that help you with your regular checkups and what you need to work on and what parts of your site might be able to really improve with just a few changes. These are websites like Google Analytics or Ahrefs, that can help you see how your different pages rank and what keywords or phrases might be particularly popular or good for you. This can be a good help for you to change the on-page part of your site.
On-page SEO refers to the way that the content on your website is read by the computers and changes to these can often just refer to switching words, rearrangements of sentences or adding things.
Off-page SEO is the more technical part of SEO and often refers to the functionality of your site along with other things like linking to and from your site.
These are both important in SEO.
There are also a lot of plugins for you to use to improve different parts of your SEO depending on what you need. This can be help to identify broken links or more to help you improve the content on your site, so it is easier to read for the computer
Read our top 10 SEO plugin recommendations!
You can also hire companies to give your SEO reports if you don’t have the ability or time to do it yourself. Though this can end up costing a lot of money.
Conclusion
SEO is a very important part of running a modern website as it is the best way to get your content seen as people search for different topics. Improving SEO is very possible, but does require a little work and a continued effort to stay on top of tendencies. There are ways to get help with your SEO both from services, plugins or companies.