Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization is the process of increasing quality organic traffic to your website through a variety of on-site and off-site techniques.

SEO is critical for any business of any size.  Users are most likely to select results that return on the first page (most likely the top 5).  SEO effort cna help put your website into the clickable results for terms that improve your bottom line.

Yes, SEO is a long-term game and you may never rank on page 1 for highly competitive terms.  The good news is that you can rank for highly valuable terms and drive converting traffic to your site.

Technical

There are technical aspects of your website that need to be set up in order for search engines to understand your site and what it is about.  This can be a complex process, but can be much easier with the help of tools that exist.  

If you run a small business website, and have WordPress as your hosting option there are a ton of free tools you can use to optimize the technical structure of your website.

In short, here are the technical aspects that your should consider:

• Is your code structured to be crawled and read by search engines?  If you are using some type of CMS, then it should be.  If you are using more custom code you might want to consider looking into this a bit further.  To make sure your site is crawlable by search engines, ensure you have a robots.txt file indicating the pages, a sitemap, and make sure pages are interlinked as appropriate.
• Are the right tags in place?  Tags are technical elements that let search engines navigate your site.  If you are working with a web developer, ask them about the tags in place and where changes might need to be made.  If you are using WordPress, install and activate the Yoast plugin.  This will easily and quickly help you enter the tags on each page and post.
• Is your site optimized for performance?  Site speed is a ranking factor for search engines, and will contribute to your rankings.  You can check your site load speed for free with Lighthouse or GTMetrix to get started to name a few.  Paid tools are also offered and will provide deeper insights than free tools.  Optimizing for performance includes having the right images, compressing your files, minifying yoru code, and enabling cache.  Your web developer can help get this done.
• Does your site have structured data?  Structured data helps search engines like Google understand the content on your site and display it as appropriate.  This can include lists, snippets, and more.

Content Elements

On-site SEO elements are the things you can do with your content that help google associate you to your audience.

• Have a specific keyword strategy and 1 targeted keyword per piece of content.  
• Interlink content appropriately.  Creating and maintaining a pillar page on your site (one per topic) and linking all relevant content to that page will help search engines understand the topic and breadth of content you are raking for.

Off-Site Elements

Off-site elements for SEO intricate the quality of your website, which is a significant ranking factor for search engines.  The more high-quality and relevant backlinks you have, the better your positioning will be.  The key is quality and relevancy.  A hundred links from sites with no relevancy are worth less than a few links from well respected sources.  Also, work to keep your links related to the topic.

Getting started with SEO means jumping in, learning, and making consistent small changes that will benefit your site.  Here are a few tips to get started:

1. Decide who is responsible.  A person or team should be responsible for your SEO efforts.  If you outsource, this will be your vendor and your point of contact.  If you decide in in-house, determine a person or team that will be responsible.
2. Set your expectations.  This is a big one.  Having the right SMART goals and expectations is important.  You will not see results overnight, and you may never see results for highly competitive keywords.
3. Do your homework.  If you are doing in-house SEO, you should understand your topics, keywords, and the problems your users face (for content creation).  Make sure to thoroughly research keywords and competitiveness to give you a leg up.
4. Assess your technical ability.  Do you have the knowledge to update your site and administrative access to do so?  These are key elements to maintaining an SEO strategy.
5. Complete a site audit.  A site audit will tell you your current traffic and how well optimized your site currently is.