WHAT IS SEO?
SEO IS AN ACRONYM FOR SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION. To be optimized means to include all the factors that a search engine uses to rank a website or webpage in the SERPs.
In general, you want to make sure your client’s website pages are optimized well. If a search engine spider visits (crawls) your webpage and goes through the many data points to grade your page, you will want your web page to perform at its best. You will want your webpage to feed the search engine exactly what it is looking for to get your webpage a perfect score of 100.
There are over 200 factors that directly correlate with a web page and how a search engine will respond to it. This response is, in a sense, a grade score. To receive a perfect score on your web page, you would have to know all 200 + factors to code. This is not a possibility because the search engines don't release their algorithm blueprints to the public. So we are left to guess (by historical data and testing) which of the 200+ factors in the algorithms are most important to apply when any web page is published online.
With such a complex algorithm, it can get quickly overwhelming and nearly impossible to achieve a perfect web page score. So, to simplify life a bit for the SEO world, we've prioritized a top 10 list for 'must have's' when building any webpage online.
WHAT ARE THE BENEFITS OF SEO?
Increases your Market Reach With Online Visibility
Strengthens your Brand Name Authority
Leverages Your Search Engine Rankings to Achieve Local and/or Worldwide Organic Traffic
Acts as a Reputation Management Asset
Increases Targeted Traffic and Leads
Rank You Very Well For Keywords
Builds Valuable Assets Online
Social Media Reach & Engagement
Search Engine Placements For Content
Multimedia Channel Syndication & Reach
Inbound Mentions and Endorsements
Builds Valuable Digital Assets
What is On-Page SEO
TECHNICAL SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the techniques, strategies, and processes, in improving website rankings organically in the search engines.
So, on-page SEO is anything that you do on your website that will help you improve rankings. Here are some of the elements of improving your organic ranking score:
Title
Meta Description
Headers
Main Content
Footers
Informative Outbound Links
Social Integration
Navigation
Site Protection
Trusted Hosting
Site Speed
Sitemaps (XML and HTML)
Dynamic Scripts
Video
Schema
Audio (not necessary, but can be helpful)
These elements are important to your marketing campaign, but there are five that need most of your attention: The URL of the page, the title, the meta description, the main content, and the headers.
What should I do to prepare for SEO?
Whatever you do in writing anything on a web page--title, meta, content--do it naturally, and not solely for search engines. Try to make them query-based: Answer questions that the public is asking about your product or service. You can even place the question in the title or meta description, but don't duplicate it.
THE TITLE: The title of your web page communicates to the user and the bots (search engine crawlers) what your page is all about. It's a proven theory--at least, in our research and testing--that the main keyword that you're attempting to rank for organically should be in the Title, and secondary keywords should be at the tail end; the order of importance of keywords is from left to right.
THE META DESCRIPTION: The meta description is both an expansion of the title and a summary of what the web page is. Just like in the title, keywords should be in importance from left to right. Avoid duplicating the title in the description, but, at the same time, keep your main keywords in there. Read it out loud, and make sure it doesn't sound fake or unnatural.
Note: There's a lot of theory around SEO circles that meta descriptions are losing importance, but as long as they're in the search results, they are still highly important...as of this date anyway.
HEADERS: Headers layout your keywords in importance and let users navigate to the topics they want. The headers of web pages have a hierarchical system of importance--just like the Title and Meta Description--except that this time the importance is from high to low. The H1 tag is the most important and should begin at the top of the page, but never use it again. H2-H6 are supportive headers to the main header, so this is where you would place your secondary keywords at.
CONTENT: THE KING OF WEBSITES: Websites still consist of one main thing: Text. While content can deal with images, video, audio, the main part that you want to optimize for is text. How do you create dynamic content for users? You simply create content that communicates clearly the answers to the questions that the general public has.
How do you know if you're creating quality content? Well, how long do people stay on your page? Do they like, share, or tweet it? Or are they silent?