How to Implement SEO for Your Business

What is SEO?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of increasing the visibility of your web site and pages on different search engines. Typically, the higher and more frequently a site appears in a search engine’s results, the more visits your site will receive.

SEO refers to “organic” results in search results. “Organic” means that you don’t pay for these rankings, as they are based purely on the quality of your site, and how relevant they are to the search query.

Your site’s SEO can be improved through a number of practices including; onsite optimizations (titles, descriptions, alt tags), link building, link disavowing, user experience optimization, and content marketing.

Keyword Research

What are people actually searching for? The first thing you should do before starting optimizations on your website is research. There are a number of tools available that show search volumes of certain phrases, which can be used to decide what keywords you should be aiming to achieve. The aim is to find a happy medium between relevant keywords, and regular search terms.

Content

Arguably one of the most important SEO practices, Google has started focusing more on quality content onsite, and less on traditional practices. Your content should be focused, relevant to the keywords, and of a suitable length. This is particularly important since the recent Google Panda update.

As well as meeting Google’s standards, this is a great way to encourage people to share your site. Great content leads to better engagements with your clients, as well as promoting a positive image for your business. Your website is a reflection of your business, so quality content can lead to better leads.

Metadata

Metadata contains information about the contents of a site. This includes titles, descriptions, image alt text, keywords, and header tags. Google no longer checks keywords on a page, but the others are perfect places to integrate your desired keywords. The key is to ensure that your desired keywords are included, without “keyword stuffing”.

Link Building

A few years ago, Google relied almost solely on back links to review the quality of a website. It makes sense. The more people that link back to a particular page, the more relevant it must be. The issue Google found with this was the increase in online directories, allowing people to create a large amount of links back to their content, without any guarantee of quality. Google now focuses on the quality of backlinks as well as the quantity.

As these practices have changed, backlinks now need to be regularly checked to ensure quality. There are softwares that allow you to check the quality of websites, so you can ensure you are receiving the best possible backlinks.

User Experience

User experience is becoming increasingly important to SEO, especially since Google introduced their mobile update earlier this year. The basic premise of it is that the longer users spend on your site, the more pages they visit, and the more content they interact with, the better quality your site must be. Creating great content can help improve the user experience, but the biggest part of this is ensuring the entire experience is streamlined.

For more information, or to discuss how Peaky Digital can help you with your SEO needs, contact our friendly team today.