Now that you understand what SEO (search engine optimization) is and why it is important, let’s delve into the basics. There are people who dedicate their entire careers or websites to discussing SEO and how to improve it, but you can greatly improve your search engine rank with just a few simple tricks. Here are the top SEO basics to be aware of.
Organic vs Artificial
To be fair, artificial isn’t always bad. A maraschino cherry might be soaked in all kinds of artificial colors and sweeteners, but it is still the perfect finish for your Amaretto Sour. There is a place and time for paid placements in Google search results, but you need to build a solid foundation first. Organic traffic will come if you cover the basics to maximize your SEO.
In short, organic search traffic means that new people are discovering your website. Organic search traffic means you aren’t paying for them to show up. Don’t you want new customers who come to your site because you have something they need? Of course you do!
Bots and Indexing
While the thought of spiders might make your skin crawl, tiny bots “crawling” your website is a very good thing. These little “spiders” go through the content of your site to take inventory of what you have. This information is relayed back to Google to help search engines understand the content of your site. You want to make sure that the information available on your site is easy to find and easy to index so that Google will “reward” your page. The more SEO friendly your site indexing is, the higher your content will rank in search results.
Name Your Media
The tiny spider bots that Google sends out are great readers but they can’t see pictures or watch videos. Consumers, on the other hand, are very visual and will often rely on images to influence their selections.
What’s a content creator to do? Name your media! Never upload an image with just a file number. Give your images and videos a name along with alt text that describes what the media is about. When bots crawl your site they will be able to identify media by the text that accompanies it, improving your SEO. Here are more tips on optimizing your images for search.
That wasn’t so hard, was it? Understanding these SEO basics will help ensure that your content shows up in search engine results. Don’t buy friends… instead, be so awesome that people are just drawn to you. That’s what good SEO can do for your website.
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