What is SEO and How It Works for Small Businesses in 2021
As a small business, building your visibility online is important if you want a bigger share of the market. And if you think I’m simply talking about marketing through social media, then you will be incorrect as growing your business online goes beyond that. To effectively grow your business online, you must be visible to the search engines. Essentially, your business blog must show up for keywords related to its niche. And to make this possibility accessible to you, you basically need to understand what is SEO and how it can help your business grow. Clutch confirms the number of small businesses that create high-quality content for SEO increased 16% from 2018. In 2020, a larger number of businesspeople have realized the value of SEO and content marketing to their business, and have made an enormous investment into it. So, why would your case be any different? In this article, I will give you a basic understanding of what is SEO. Furthermore, I will take you through different aspects of these conversations, showing you how a search engine functions and how you can optimize your blog and content to fit the SEO rule. What is SEO & How Does It Work? SEO is an acronym that represents Search Engine Optimization. While this may sound strange to many internet users, it should something that you should be very familiar with when you want to do business online. Running an online business without SEO will cost you more money. Search engines have a duty to offer every searcher results relevant to their search. And to effectively execute this responsibility, they must ensure they have pages that communicate the best answers to every query indexed and ready to produce as a result page. However, before they can introduce the search engine results of these pages, the search engine robots crawl the pages of these platforms to ensure they have accurate information that’s worthy of showing up on a result page. Furthermore, they run test to ensure the content is optimized for the keyword in question. Search Engine Optimization is the process whereby you streamline any content to be a brilliant answer to a particular query or set of queries that searchers will input on the search engines. When your contents have SEO optimization, it helps set your brand as an authority in its niche. What Are the Unique Aspects of Search Engine Optimization? Search optimization has two unique aspects, however, content marketing is an important aspect people often overlook. So, in this section, we will take a closer look at these aspects of search engine optimization and how they can affect the online presence of your business. On Page Optimization If you want your content to rank online, then on-page optimization is necessary. When you get the optimization right on-page, you make it easy for the search engine robots to crawl your site, increase your site performance, and a lot of other things on the front end. On-page optimization works in certain sections of your website that include: Internal Linking Internal links help people spend more time on your site, and you know dwell time can boost your rankings. With proper internal linking, you can build your SEO and reduce your bounce rate. When doing your internal linking, ensure you link to anchor text – avoid linking to a text that has only one word. Furthermore, find out articles that have great relevance to the content you’re writing when you want to do your internal linking. Title Tag The title tag is another important aspect of search engine optimization that a lot of bloggers overlook. If your title tag is messed up, you mess your SEO up. Title tag helps search engines and users know the relevance of a page and the quality of conversations that will transpire within. When you optimize your title tags, you help search engines rank your content better. Meta Description A meta description is a little section of text, not over 150 characters, that explains basic information about a content. A good meta description highlights or summarizes the content by highlighting the most important things about that content. Quality meta descriptions capture the keyword of any article, and even if you cannot write a meta description, the search engines will create one automatically for your blog. Image and Alt Tags Images are a very important aspect of SEO. While a lot of bloggers use images, a good number of them never use alt tags on the images. Alt tags are a very important aspect of on-page optimization. A good alt tag will reflect the focus keyword of your content sop search engines can rank it alongside the query. Sub Headings Writing content is not usually a problem; structuring content stands as the basic problem. This problem of content structure has made a lot of content fail to get visible on the internet as search engines can’t crawl and index them. Subheadings are the nuts that screw poorly structured content together. With the tight subheadings, the search engines can give priority and crawl the posts better. Note: When you want a content to rank and do well on the internet, optimizing for one or two keywords is important. Additionally, submitting your site map to the search engines makes it easier for them to crawl your content and scan your pages with ease. Off Page Optimization When you’ve done your on-page optimization, you’ve only completed one aspect of the job. Off-page optimization doesn’t focus on what happens within your content or blog space, but what happens outside it that can help you build trust and become visible to search engines. Off-page optimization falls under three aspects which include: Backlink According to Moz, Backlinks are especially valuable for SEO because they represent a “vote of confidence” from one site to another. In essence, back links to your website are a signal to search engines that others vouch for your content. Search engines believe sites should complement and not compete. So, to boost the