What Is SEO? A Complete Guide to Search Engine Optimization

In creating a website for your business, you will consider some aspects, including being accessible and user-centered. Therefore, many business owners that have websites use SEO to optimize it for users (human users and search engines).

Along with helping consumers locate your website and decide whether or not to visit it via a search engine, SEO aims to help search engines comprehend your content.

To figure out more about search engine optimization and how these digital marketing tactics help your business shine brightly in the market, read the explanation below!

What Is SEO Marketing?

SEO or search engine optimization is the practice of making your site visible in search engines, like Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc, organically (unpaid). SEO aims to place your website higher in search results for business-related queries.

But, why must you appear higher on the search results? A higher position can increase website visitors, which can boost conversions for your company. In addition, the more frequently you show up in a prominent place, the more people recognize your brand, increasing your brand awareness. 

In general, there are four main aspects of SEO you can implement to your website, such as:

• Keyword research: Figure out what people are looking for.
• Off-page SEO: Enhance brand authority and reputation through link building.
• On-page SEO: Optimizing the content and internal elements of the website.
• Technical SEO: Maintain and improve website performance. 

Another question is, why does SEO matter so much for your website? One of the primary tasks of SEO is to help you rank on relevant keywords. Therefore, you can reach wider prospects and convert them into paid customers. 

Remember that you are not alone in the market; competitors are offering the same or perhaps better than yours and users will probably choose them instead. Ultimately, a higher position usually results in a higher click-through rate and more impressions.

Moreover, because SEO enhances the user experience, it can result in higher conversion rates and engagement, including more visitors coming from sources other than search engines. To sum up, SEO is ideal for excellent return on investment (ROI). 

SEO vs. SEM, What’s the Difference?

Talking about search engine optimization, you might also encounter SEM or search engine marketing. In fact, SEO is part of SEM since this marketing tactic uses both paid and unpaid strategies to rank better on search engines. 

While SEO focuses on organic results, SEM also uses Pay-per-click (PPC) which focuses on paid results from campaigns and paid ads. 

You can see what PPC and SEO create to gain traffic on search results, where PPC is usually marked as “Sponsored” or “Ads” and placed above organic results. 

On the other hand, SEO-crafted content will appear below the PPC ones and will not have any label above the URL. 

Then, if both are targeting more traffic, what is the core difference? In fact, click-through rates are often higher for organic results because people tend to trust them more than advertisements. Additionally, organic results might produce consistent traffic at little to no continuous expense.

How Do SEO and Search Engines Work?

In general, search engines will crawl, index, and rank the content published on the internet. To crawl the content, search engines have crawler bots that explore the content. After that, the search engines will analyze and index it. 

The search engine attempts to comprehend the intent of the user's query and then presents the top results from its index using a sophisticated algorithm.

With this basic information of how search engines work, SEO aligns your website with it and fulfill its main goal: presenting the best results for users. In essence, search engines rank search results using intricate procedures and standards to provide users with the greatest possible search experience.

However, search engines never openly discuss the system they use for ranking the content and continuously update it for better results. Therefore, you must diligently test, analyze, and adapt to the changes and strategies. 

Types of SEO

After understanding what is SEO, you must know the types of it that you can implement to your site, such as:

1. On-Page SEO

As mentioned before, on-page SEO is the practice of optimizing the content and internal elements of your site to improve search visibility. Mostly, this tactic employs keyword optimization in some places, like:

• Title tag.
• Meta description.
• Alt text.
• URL slug.
• Subheadings tag.
• H2 tag.

In incorporating keyword optimization, you must avoid keyword stuffing to prevent getting penalized by Google. Once you get the penalty, it can damage your online visibility or even your rank. 

2. Off-Page SEO

Different from on-page SEO, off-page works outside your website to enhance your authority and reputation. There are many off-page strategies you can do, such as link building, influencer marketing, guest blogging, and so on. 

3. Technical SEO

Technical SEO focuses on enhancing the technical elements on your website so that it performs better and increases online visibility. Technical SEO also makes sure that your site is crawlable and indexable by search engine bots. 

Along with that, technical SEO focuses on giving the best user experience to the visitors by making your site load fast, secure, and mobile-friendly. 

4. Local SEO

If you also want to target regional audiences, then local SEO is suitable for you. Local search engine optimization helps you to increase visibility on location-specific search results. One of the tactics you can use is optimizing your Google Business Profile. 

5. Image SEO

You might put images in your site or content, and if you do, you must optimize it with SEO to appear on search results. To do so, you can compress and resize the image as well as add alt text. 

6. Video SEO

Not only images but you must also optimize for the video to show up on the search results, including the search engines and video platform. To do it, you can add keywords on the video title and description and use schema markup. 

SEO Best Practices (by Google)

Knowing what is SEO is important, and so is SEO best practices. Google on their documentation reveals some best practices to make your site perform better on search results, such as:

1. Organize Your Website

The first Google search engine optimization tactic is to organize your website. Having a well-organized website will help Google understand what your page is about. You can use descriptive URLs, group similar pages in directories topically, and determine the canonical version of your pages to prevent duplicate content. 

2. Create Compelling and Valuable Content

To rank better on search results, you must produce high-quality and useful content for your website. When producing, you must ensure that your content is readable, well-organized, original, updated, reliable, user-first, and helpful. 

Moreover, you must understand the keywords that your potential audiences use to find your content on search engines and the search behavior so that you can serve the relevant content for them.

Additionally, you can link your content to relevant resources so that you can be discovered easily by Google and connect it and users to other pages on your site. 

3. Do Not Put Distracting Advertisements

Although advertisements are a necessary component of the internet and should be seen by customers, you must avoid making them too intrusive or preventing readers from reading your content. 

4. Add and Optimize Images on Your Website

Images may be the first thing people see when they visit your website because many people search visually. Therefore, you must make sure that both users and search engines can locate and comprehend the photographs you publish on your website.

Regarding this, you can use high-quality images and add descriptive alt text to the image to explain the connections between your content and the image. 

5. Promote Your Site

Last but not least, you must promote your site to be discovered easily by the prospects and search engines. You can promote it on social media, community, advertisement, and many more. 

Conclusion

Those are the ins and outs of SEO you should know before implementing it on your website. The works in SEO seem a lot; hence, many businesses work with SEO consultants for better results. 

You can work with an SEO company if you are short on resources, but still want to win the digital market. In this case, SEO Service by cmlabs can be your ace! What are you waiting for? talk with our marketing team now and tell us your SEO needs for free!