Trillions of searches are conducted every year – and search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the most important things any brand or business can do to drive traffic, leads, and customers online. It’s a set of techniques that help search engines find, rank and display content to people who are looking for it. Unlike paid advertising or social media traffic, which can sometimes bring in lots of visitors but ultimately have little long-term value, search engines can provide consistent, measurable, and sustainable results over time.
When you think about it, SEO is actually a very simple idea: It’s the process of making your web pages and overall website as relevant as possible to searchers who are looking for what you have to offer. Search engines look at a number of different elements to determine how to surface a page in response to a search query:
First, they look at the content of the page itself. This is how they understand the topic of a given piece of content and whether it might be relevant for a particular search query. They also look at the structure of a page, including its HTML code and how it’s organized. This can affect how easy it is for a crawler to read and index the content.
Then, they consider the links that point to a given page and how other pages on your site are linked to it. This can impact the quality of those links as well as how much weight a page gets from other related pages on your site. They also look at how quickly a page loads and whether it’s mobile-friendly.
Finally, they consider the meta description – which is what shows up under the title tag on the SERP – and how well it matches the search query. This can also impact the click-through rate of a search result and its ranking.
All of these factors work together to create a search engine’s “score” for a page and how likely it is to appear in the top results for a given search. The higher the score, the more likely it is that a page will be seen by searchers and clicked on.
The good news is that there are many ways to influence these scores, which we’ll cover in this article. By following these best practices, you can optimize your content for search engines and improve your chances of ranking highly in organic search results. This is the best way to grow your audience over time, rather than relying on short-lived and unreliable sources like paid ads or social media. And of course, it’s the best way to ensure that the traffic you do get is from people who are interested in your product or service. This will ultimately help you achieve your marketing goals – whether those are converting searchers into customers or building a community that keeps coming back for more. So, let’s dive in!