What Is SEO? Benefits, How It Works, and Best Practices

There are tons of websites on the internet that are chasing Google’s top spot. If you are one of them, then you need to understand the strategy that makes you stay ahead of the fierce competition. One of the most effective ways to get a higher rank on search engines is to have a strong SEO strategy.

What is SEO? You might find this term unfamiliar and puzzling to you. But don’t worry! In this article, we are going to tell you the fundamentals of SEO and its best practices. Read the following sections to learn more.

What Is SEO?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, which helps you rank higher on search engines such as Google and Bing. It is a digital marketing technique that involves the practice of improving your website’s structure and content to drive traffic through organic search results.

There are over 1 billion websites on the internet which shows a lot of competition is going on out there.

Imagine you are a customer searching for a piece of dress online. How do you think your favourite brand shows up on the first page of search results despite the huge competition? 

There are many ways that brands can come up with their digital marketing strategy. However, there is a surefire way to outrank the competitors, and that is using SEO.

Why You Should Care About SEO

People are always searching for something online. This could be finding a product or information on the internet. For this reason, brands must rank on the first page of search results to be seen by potential customers. This is where you need SEO to boost your online visibility.

Here are some of the benefits of SEO that you should consider:

• Helps people find your website. SEO helps you generate an organic search, which is an important source of traffic as it accounts for 62% of the total traffic on all websites, according to a study by Marketing Insider Group. It makes SEO a very effective way to target the largest traffic source to attract more visitors.
• Budget-friendly strategy. It does not require a huge investment to get results. While there is an investment in resources and time, it provides long-lasting results. This is because once your website ranks on the first page, you will continue getting more visitors in the future.
• Improves brand awareness. Ranking on the first page of search results will increase brand awareness as more people can see your brand often. As a result, they will be more familiar with your brand and what you offer.
• Helps you understand your customers. SEO helps you understand your customers better as it allows you to see their activity and behaviour. Using that information, you can improve your website to make it more relevant to the users.
• Increases user experience (UX). It helps you create a better UX for your visitors by making your website more user-friendly and easy to navigate. This will make them stay longer on your site and interact with your content. 
• Improves your site’s reputation. SEO increases your site's credibility and improves its reputation in the eyes of search engines. Ranking on first page results means that Google trusts you, and so do your customers. 

How Does SEO Work?

How can SEO help your website appear on the first page of search results? To answer this question, you need to understand how search engines like Google work. Google uses an algorithm to determine how relevant your website is to the search query. Here is a breakdown of how SEO works:

1. Crawling

The first step in the SEO process is crawling, which involves Google’s bot or spider crawling through pages on the internet. The crawler scans pages to gather relevant information about the content and the structure. 

2. Indexing

After successfully crawling the pages, Google indexes them. Indexing is the process of storing the crawled information in a database to make it searchable. Therefore, when a search query is submitted, Google will look for the most relevant content in its database.

3. Ranking

Google ranks the most relevant content for each query. There are many factors that determine the ranking of a page, including the relevance of the content, the quality of the content, the number of backlinks, and more.

SEO Best Practices

To make your SEO efforts more effective, it is important to understand the best practices for SEO. It requires a combination of on-page, off-page, and technical SEO techniques. Here are several SEO best practices that you can follow:

1. Conduct Keyword Research

The first step in SEO optimization is keyword research. You need to know what keywords are relevant to your business and your target audience. This will help you choose the right keyword to use in your content.

Not only should it be relevant, but it also must be the most searched keyword in your niche and see how high the competition is. Keyword research tools will show you the monthly search frequency and competition for each keyword. 

2. Write Quality Content 

After you have done your keyword research, it’s time to write quality content targeting those keywords. The quality of your content will have a direct impact on your ranking on search engines. 

So, how do you write quality content? The most important thing to keep in mind is that you should write content that aligns with the user intent, provides a good reading experience, avoids keyword stuffing, as well as writes in-depth and organised content.

3. Insert Keywords 

Other than in the body of the content, you must also add keywords in some specific spots that search engines can easily find and crawl. Some of the most important places are the title tag, the page title (H1 tag), meta description, headings, image alt tags, and URL.

4. Optimise Your Title and Meta Description

On every page of an SEO website, there are two titles that you must optimise: the title tag and the H1 tag. A title tag is the title that will show up on the SERPs, while an H1 tag is the title that will be displayed on the web page.

You can do several things to optimise your titles, including using your main keyword, having only an H1 tag per page, keeping title tags to 55-60 characters, and covering the content value.

Other than the titles, you need to pay attention to the meta description too. A meta description is description text that appears on the SERPs below the title tag. It is an important aspect of SEO, as Google uses it to crawl the page to understand what the content is about.

To optimise your meta description, make sure to insert the main keyword, keep it short from 155 to 165 characters, and make it engaging. 

5. Increase the Website User Experience (UX)

Increasing the website user experience can be a direct and indirect factor in improving your search engine rankings.

It is a direct factor in the sense that it directly influences the bounce rate and time on site. The more people stay on your website, the more Google will consider it a high-quality website that deserves to be ranked higher.

The indirect factor is that it indirectly influences the chance of people sharing your website and the number of backlinks.

Imagine that if your website is not user-friendly, stuffed with ads and pop-ups, as well as having plenty of broken links, then people will be less likely to share and link to a website that is frustrating to use.

6. Improve Your Site Speed

The next step in SEO optimization is to improve your site’s loading speed. This is one of the most important factors in SEO ranking, as Google prioritises websites with fast loading speeds. 

To do this, you can start by going to Google PageSpeed Insights to see how fast your website is. Google will give you a report about the speed of your website and suggestions on how to improve it. 

7. Monitor Your Site Performance 

Don’t forget to keep an eye on your website performance using the Google Search Console tool. It is crucial to be aware of your site performance to see how well your SEO strategy is working.

In the Google Search Console, you will find how many visitors your website has and how many pages they have viewed. It will also give you an idea of how many clicks your website gets and which keywords your website ranks for.

By analysing this data, you can easily determine which parts of your SEO strategy need improvement and make adjustments accordingly.

8. Optimise Images for SEO

Images are now considered an essential part of your SEO marketing, as they are not only useful for ranking in Google Images but also to help your pages rank higher in Google web searches. Therefore, make sure your images are optimised for SEO.

There are several ways to optimise images for SEO, such as naming the image file with a descriptive name and adding alt tags, which is an HTML attribute that describes an image.

9. Utilise Internal and External Links

Another SEO best practice that you can employ is to link your pages to other pages within your site. This helps Google understand the structure of your site and the relationship between the pages. 

However, to get the most out of your internal linking, try to use keywords in your anchor text as a clue to what the linked page is about. You also need to send an authority to the pages that don’t have inbound links to boost their rankings.

10. Build Backlinks

The last SEO best practice is to build backlinks. This is another effective ways to improve your SEO results and get your site ranked higher on the search engines by getting other people to link back to your site. 

There are many ways to build backlinks, including using content formats, which will encourage other websites to link to your content. A study by Backlinko reported that “Why Posts”, “What Posts” and infographics are formats that get linked more often than other formats like videos.

It doesn’t mean that using these formats will automatically guarantee you backlinks. However, they will significantly increase the likelihood of other websites linking to your content. 

Another way to build backlinks is by crafting content with a hook. That hook can be a data point, an angle, or a controversial topic that will attract the attention of other websites and encourage them to link to you.

Conclusion

Those are the overviews of what is SEO in digital marketing and its best practices. Based on the information above, it is clear that SEO is a crucial aspect of your digital marketing strategy. Therefore, you should invest in a strong SEO strategy to make your business more visible and competitive in the digital space.

You can implement SEO best practices to ensure that your website is getting the best possible ranking in the SERPs. However, if you are new to SEO, it is best to seek professional aid to get the job done right. 

SEO Services by cmlabs is ready to help and accompany your SEO journey. We have a team of SEO experts who can take care of your SEO needs and ensure that your website is getting the expected result, which is getting a spot on the first page and driving more organic traffic.

So, don’t wait any longer! Contact our marketing team today to talk through your SEO goals and get the best deals ever!