Google is the world’s favourite search engine and they dictate the rules of the game for businesses operating digitally. The artform of competing for the top spots in Google’s rankings is referred to as SEO and it has become a massive industry — leading to businesses to invest heavily into it. The formula is simple: the higher your Google ranking, the more traffic you get.Â
To many though, SEO remains a mystery due to all of the technical jargon associated with it; however, firms are having to learn more about this form of digital marketing in order to increase their online visibility. Ignoring it will only place you behind your competitors. Read on for a quick overview of SEO and what it can do for your business.
The Three Main Pillars of SEO
There are three main parts to SEO: on-page, off-page and technical. Each of these different parts contributes significantly to the overall authority of your website so the secret is to give each section the care and attention it deserves in order for it to positively impact your rankings.Â
On-Page SEO
As the name suggests, this refers to the on-page elements that need to be fully optimized. An important aspect of on-page SEO is ensuring that the content is of high enough value for it to be deemed worthy of a search result position. If it provides what the user came to see, then that is very important to search engines. Other significant areas of on-page SEO include:
- Meta tags
- Clean URL structures
- Internal/External links
- Keyword targeted content
- Optimizing images
All of these elements might be slightly overwhelming, but taking the time to understand and tackle these issues will only benefit your website. Alternatively, you can always look to an established digital agency, such as Click Intelligence, to deal with all of these issues.Â
Off-Page SEO
Unfortunately, writing compelling content is not enough — it’s only half the battle. In order for it to get the recognition it deserves, you need to invest time into promoting your content to push your website further up Google’s rankings. This is a part of off-page SEO. It’s all about getting highly reputable websites to link to yours. Google sees these links as a vote of confidence in the quality of your content and website, thereby pushing your website further up their rankings. This whole process is referred to as link-building.
Technical SEO
This aspect of SEO focuses on tightening the nuts and bolts on a website to make it fully optimized to compete in the digital landscape. Having content that is relevant and enticing is something you should try to attain, but without technical SEO, your audience will be searching for your content in the dark.Â
The objective here is to make your website as streamlined as possible to make it fully optimized for the crawling and indexing phase. Important aspects of technical SEO include:
- Canonical URLs
- Website speed
- Redirects
- Optimize Robots.txt
- Pagination
- Navigation and site structure
Get in touch with some SEO experts if you need more help.