A Brief Guide to Understanding SEO

The three letters that make up the simple abbreviation SEO can be terrifying to someone who has never worked with it before. SEO stands for search engine optimization and everyone wants a piece of it nowadays. As social media prowess and quality online content and marketing geared towards SEO becomes a highly sought after skill in the ecommerce world, as a newbie to the game, knowing where to start can feel overwhelming. Why is it important and why you need it for your business’ website? This short overview can help give you a better grasp.

What is Search Engine Optimization?

You’ve decided to landscape your front yard and need to get some information on where to buy supplies in your town and where to find a quality landscape designer. So, you plunk down at your computer, using Google, Bing, Yahoo- or any search engine- to begin your quest. You type in some keyword phrases and the search engine pulls up a list of landscape companies in your town. Which websites will you click first? The ones on page two of the search results or the first four that are listed?

I’m sure the first websites listed will be your go to. These are the sites that the search engine has deemed most reliable and compatible to what you’re looking for based on the key phrases you searched. The tactics, content and other elements used to create these websites have impacted how well they rank in a search, with the top ranked driving the most traffic to their websites. This is what SEO is all about.

With that being said- The detailed construction of your website from head to toe is extremely crucial so that search engines can easily find the most important parts for ranking. Here are some vital SEO terms to get familiar with, especially if you are interested in building a website:

Keywords: Each page on a website has a main objective. A keyword that relates to that objective connects the search engine to the page.

Title Tags: You’ll find this important ranking element in SERP (search engine results page) and browser tab. Title tags consist of a primary keyword and brand name, separated by a pipe, colon or comma.

Header Tags: The content of your website will be broken up into sections, with each section utilizing its own headline. Each should include the main keyword.

Body content: Keep it short and sweet- around 300 words to to avoid search engine penalties.

Internal links: This is important to include in the body of content. Not only do links make it a cinch for users to navigate your website to find exactly what they need, but it makes it easier for search engines to find pertinent information as well.

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