SEO is a marketing discipline used to improve the visibility of your business for organic search results to make sure you are reaching your desired target audience and generate traffic to your website. It combines creativity, proven metrics and technical strategies to help drive traffic, and increase your ranking among search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo. Increasing your ranking in the search engines expands your brand and makes your website more relevant, accessible and visible to a wider audience and potential customers, or leads. SEO increases traffic to your website.
SEO is a practice of utilizing the elements below to communicate to search engines like Google, Bing, and others. These search engines use computer programs called bots to crawl a website looking for these elements and “Indexing” the site for SERP’s (Search Engine Results Page).
Here are the elements of a well-optimized page:
| SEO Tags | SSL (Secure Certificate) | Speed |
| Text ratio | Image filenames | Alt-Text on images |
| Backlinks | Crosslinks | Google Integration |
| Sitemap.xml | Robots.txt | Schema.org |
| Keywords / Longtail | Keyword Saturation | Meta Description |
There are two types of SEO: Black-hat and White-hat. Black-hat is a short play that focuses on developing your content for search engines only. It can result in spam and will not be sustained for a long life within search engines. It’s a quick burn. However, the white hat focuses on developing meaningful content that is relevant for a human audience but also intentionally takes into account search engine rules and algorithms. It weaves a thread between the two by supplying great content but understands the metrics that lead to relevancy. It’s a long and better play for your business.
Let’s say your business sells tools. If someone is looking for tools and searches “tools” on Google the first page has the highest-ranking sites related to tools. The goal of SEO is to increase your site’s ranking and if you are on the first page Google will send you targeted leads of people wanting to buy your tools. The free traffic from Google and other search engines increase your site traffic, brand awareness and revenue.
Increasing your ranking takes time, experience and resources but it works. As keywords, keyphrases, text and title tags combine with more content and web pages traffic will increase and your business will grow. SEO is one of the best plays your company can make in digital marketing. It’s proven with tangible data and a strong ROI.