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
- Title Tag
- Meta Description
- Image and Alt Tags
- Sub Headings
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:
- Backlinks
- Social Shares
- Trust
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 rankings of your content, you need to get quality back links from sites with higher authority and trusted web presence. A good way to do this would be to pay for back links or offer them another transaction wherein they give you a back link for a service or product.
Social Shares
Social media helps any content go viral. Although you can be a prolific writer commanding expert knowledge of SEO, if you don’t understand how to grow your business with digital marketing, you’re reducing your chances of ranking for tightly contested keywords in your niche. Getting quality shares from influencers and users help your content on search engines perform better.
Trust
Trust is not built in a day and the same rule applies for the internet space as well. The trustworthiness of a website makes search engines crawl its posts faster besides ranking them immediately. To build trust on the internet, you must get quality back links, have great click through rate on your contents, and rank for many keywords. As you introduce more quality contents, search engines rank you as your trust quotient increases.
Content Marketing
No search engine will rank an empty result page. They must rank a content that is attuned towards the searchers intent, and this is where your content marketing skills become vital. Of course, it’s not news that poor content can kill SEO on the spot.
When creating content, ensure you execute your research properly regarding ranking keywords and use subheadings to separate different schools of thought. A great post can help you rank for many keywords, but more posts will do better for you, especially when you’re an elaborate writer.
Using the right key phrases when writing a content is another challenge a lot of SEO writers face. A good rule would be to focus on one or two key phrases per content as developed from your research. This way, search engines can pull up your result page when people search for that content.
Creating different content pieces with similarities cutting across all of them makes content writing and internal linking easy. With this type of content, you don’t need to input irrelevant internal links to your content because you want to obey search engine optimization rules.
Although creating content is really demanding, you need to do it if you want to remain relevant on the search engine. And you need to consistently create fresh content. You can start with a few blog posts before you delve into the complex listed and research contents. If you’re not a fan of writing SEO content, then you can hire the right people to help you.
Creating SEO content consistently can take its toll on you. SEO content writing takes a lot of time and research to do. Instead of spending all your time writing content, talk to Socialander by clicking “I want a Free Consultation Session”. and we will help you create great contents.
Black Hat SEO vs White Hat SEO
When we discuss SEO, we can’t complete the conversation without looking at Black Hat SEO and White Hat SEO. The truth remains; both methods work, however, one method has a lot of disadvantages when you compare it with the other one.
A lot of companies don’t care about upholding search engine practices, as many of them want to rank for popular keywords. For this reason, they use black hate SEO techniques such as keyword stuffing to optimize their pages for many contents.
By the time they complete this process, their contents rank for these keywords, but readers want it difficult to comprehend the content. With time search engines will see the trick and penalize these sites heavily. So, it’s not a winning formula as it cannot be sustainable in the long-run.
Alternatively, when you use white hat SEO, you can write contents capable of staying on the web and drawing a lot of social shares and reviews. White Hat SEO focuses on the human reader as each topic, structure and headings is completely optimized to help the reader gain a strong understanding of the subject.
With this process, search engines will crawl your content and rank them based on their click through rate and user preference. Although it will take some time for your content to rank, especially when you’re a newbie website, that ranking will increase your engagement and draw more leads to you as well.
Conclusion
With every lesson you’ve learnt from this article, you can make the right changes to your website so it can start ranking. Indeed, you’ll be surprised at the quality of results you will encounter after making some of these highly necessary changes.
You have to understand that your website will not blow up immediately; it’s a gradual process that takes time and requires a lot of patience. However, the regards from optimizing your site and contents will help you build a sustainable and trusted platform on the web.
In everything you do, ensure you write your contents to answer directly the user’s questions and proffer easy adoptable solutions to their problems. This way, you always show up for relevant keywords that will get high click-through rates and visitors.
If you’re still finding your way around SEO, you don’t need to keep stressing. Book a Free Marketing Consultation with our team by clicking “I want a Free Consultation Session” so we can automate the process for you.
