SEO and Beyond
One of the most common things many of us do on a daily basis is jump on Google to search for something. Whether it be from finding a good place to eat to information about skydiving near me, these results are all retrieved in a remarkable amount of seconds. Getting the best possible answers is the job of Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
The main purpose behind SEO is to grow visibility in your site with organic, or non-paid, search engine results.
Why is SEO important?
SEO can use multiple technical and creative skills to help improve website rankings and increase awareness and traffic to your site.
If you're a business trying to get more eyeballs on your site, having SEO is essential. With people using common search engines like Google, Bing or Yahoo, making sure that your site provides the best content, services, products, and information for their search is increases opportunities. SEO is the pathway to getting people on your site. Without it, there is no way for people to be clicking on your site, because no one is going to scroll through 100 search result pages just to find your site. They want to click on the first few that pop up.
The structure and content of your site can really make or break whether you get traffic or not. Google is looking at the user experience, mobile optimization and speeds of sites when considering them. As people demand to have their search queries answered more quickly, knowing those algorithms and how to make the user experience better can really change the game for your business. Moz has an entire 10 chapter guide to understanding and getting the basics of SEO. In addition to SEO, the knowledge of link building is just as important to having a thriving business.
Link Building Will Take You Places
While search engines have to "crawl" the web to find different web pages, the ability of them to do so comes from link building. This acquires hyperlinks from other websites that leads to your own site. Building these links can vary in difficulty and technique
Check out the bones of this link:
Here's a few steps in understanding the above link:
- Start of the link tag: This is called an anchor tag and it opens the link tag while telling search engines that another link is about to follow
- Link referral location: "href" is the "hyperlink referral," which is the URL to the link opening. Sometimes this could be an image or file instead of an actual website. Anything that has a # sign (no, its not a hashtag) indicates local links that take you to a different section on the page.
- Visible/anchor text of link: This areas shows the text that users will see on the page, which needs to be clicked in order to open. The link is usually blue or underlined, to show that it can be clicked and navigate to another page.
- Closure of link tag: This is the end of the link tag to the search engines.
It's pretty interesting to see how and why certain elements make up a link. The main ways that these links can be used is to find new web pages and help figure out the ranking in search engine results.
Google shared a little bit about how search works:
If more creative and unique pages can link to your website, the better ranking you can get in search results.
But what does all of this mean today? I mean, SEO programming has probably started changing faster than we change phones!
Implications of SEO
Facebook has been a big lesson to the digital world of what not to do; lie to your consumers.
Their website structure has taken a huge toll because of their actions in light of Cambridge Analytica, but that doesn't mean SEO needs to suffer. Some of their metrics like Custom Audience size, Partner Data, and APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) have disappeared. There is more dependence on sticking to real personas, and data that is available.
This shift is a good things because it reminds businesses that they are still held accountable for all of their actions. For SEO, while it does create a way for businesses to be found faster, it also reminds them that they can't be linking to sites that are deceiving. Their intentions and transparency are vital. That is something important to keep in mind.
How do you plan to use SEO for your company?