SEO: What It Is & How To Jump Start Your Website’s SEO Strategy
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization (so saying SEO optimization is akin to saying ATM machine). The purpose of SEO is to make your website more visible to people who are using search engines. This typically involves selecting the best keywords that represent the purpose of your website, and then leveraging those keywords within your content so your webpage appears higher up in search results.
One key aspect of SEO is that it’s essentially a FREE marketing technique for businesses (unless you pay someone to perform SEO for you). If you strategically format your website with the appropriate keywords, then you’ll steadily begin to rise in the ranks of the search engine (i.e. Google) results pages. This shouldn’t, however, be confused with paid search marketing, which allows you to buy ad and display space on search engine results pages. Paid search marketing utilizes SEO keywords within its ads, but SEO can be conducted on its own, outside of paid search campaigns, within your website. Here are 4 steps to help you jump start your website’s SEO strategy:
How to Start A SEO Strategy
1. Create List of Keywords
Conduct personal research on the keywords you want to rank with. A good way to do this is to type words of interest into Google and see what populates from that query. For example: If your website is on healthy foods, you may want to search “healthy foods”. In your findings, you may see that “low sugar” or “healthy food recipes” are keywords tied to your original search, and then determine to modify your terms based on your website’s specificity.
2. Create Pages With Keyword Focus
Make content that uses your selected keywords properly. This is crucial to your search engine ranking because Google’s algorithms actually read the content on your webpages. What this means is that optimizing with a high trending keyword such as “Beyonce`” in hopes of gaining more page hits will not work. Google will determine that your website’s SEO has nothing to do with its content and index you lower in the search results ranking. Having landing pages that relate to your SEO keywords (which is what you are aiming towards) is known as White Hat SEO, visit The Balance to learn more about it.
3. Set Up Blog, Ebook, Video
Create content using your SEO keywords about topics that will interest your target audience. This content should be easily sharable as the goal of this process is to add to the richness of your SEO within your website, while generating inbound marketing leads with usable resources for potential visitors.
4. Create Link Building Plan
Google and other major search engines not only ensure that your SEO keywords relate to your page content - they also look at the quality of websites linking to and from your website. When you write a blog post on your website that includes a link to another website (such as the The Balance above in #2), Google sees that the linked website is credible and places you higher in the search results ranking. Comparatively, if other websites link to your website, Google analyzes and determines the quality of these as well.
