Beginner's Guide to SEO and Link Building

What is SEO?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the practice of making changes to your site to increase both the quality and quantity of website traffic.

SEO is used to increase exposure to your business through earned, organic search engine results by placing high in the page rankings.

To place high, businesses must understand what their audience is searching for, the answers they seek, what keywords they're using, and the type of content they want to consume. It is critical to know the answers to these questions to build an optimized site that connects you to the right people.

How does SEO Work?

Search engines crawl and index the internet to develop a "ranking" of which sites to show that best matches a searcher's query.

These algorithms have evolved to be extremely complex, and take into account hundreds or even thousands of different ranking factors to determine the order of the search engine result pages. Making small changes, or optimizations can greatly impact your site's user experience and performance in organic search results.

Why Practice SEO?

Using a search engine is one of the main ways in which people discover content online. When searching for answers, only 2-3% of searchers click beyond the first page of search results if they can't find what they're looking for.

This is why it is critical to optimize your site to deliver better information to search engines so your content can be properly indexed and displayed in search results. Search results are presented in an ordered list, and the higher up on that list a site can get, the more traffic your site will tend to receive.

What is Link Building?

Link building is the process of securing a link on another website that connects back to your own site. Doing this allows you to build your authority and increase your chances of ranking well and getting traffic from organic search.

Why Link Build?

Google search is based around links. The more links you have from relevant and authoritative websites, the better your website will perform in search for relevant queries. Links also drive referral traffic and help develop relationships in your industry.

Links are valuable for marketing, audience development, relationship building, and?search engine optimization. These internal links can lead crawlers to new pages and help search engines understand which pages on your website are the most important.

How to Link Build?

There are many of link building strategies used to get external websites to link to yours. Creating compelling, unique, high-quality content that people will naturally want to reference and link to is one way to secure a connection.

In addition to this, creating a site that's considered expert, authoritative, and trustworthy holds a higher dominance in the eyes of search engines, and will lead to being recognized and linked by more external sites.

Important Issues in the World of SEO 2021:

• Page load speed is an issue facing many businesses in 2021. It’s crucial for your site to be fast. Not only to load fast, but to interact fast as well. Since load speed is a search engine ranking factor, 53%?of people will abandon a page if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load. While you could have everything optimized in terms of keywords, relevant content, and link building, slow loading will de-rank and discourage traffic from your site.
• In a mobile-first world, being mobile-friendly is a determining factor for ranking in search results. A poor mobile design like illegible fonts, small font sizes, and on-screen clutter can hinder your business's performance and decline your ranking for mobile users. In 2021, the gap between primary mobile users vs desktop users is tightening, where about 58% of all search queries globally originate from mobile devices.