Search engine marketing, most commonly known as SEO is a vital part of your marketing strategy and online campaign. But what is SEO? Can you do it yourself or should you refer to an SEO Agency in Boca Raton folk rely on for help? In this article we are going to give a brief introduction to SEO, and look at why it is so important for web design and most importantly for your online marketing campaign. We will look at backlinks, and will touch base with black hat and white hat SEO. SEO is complex yet it is essential. So, let’s get stuck in.
Search Engine Optimization. Understanding the Basics
Let’s take a look at what SEO means, and how to use search engines. Depending on your preferences, you may use Bing, Google, or Yahoo as your search engine. So, let’s say that you are looking to buy a wedding dress locally. What would your keyword be? It wouldn’t be just “wedding dresses” It would be a phrase that includes your local area, and possibly something more. You might be looking for “cheap wedding dresses Boca Raton” or “vintage wedding dresses near me” These phrases are the ones that you will add to your search enquiry in the enquiry box on your preferred search engine. You will instantly see sponsored and non-sponsored results and webpages come up. These should match your query.
So, have you ever wondered how the companies that show up as number 1 or number 2 in the list got there? The answer to this is through their online marketing campaign. Sponsored results at the top and “ads” results are companies that are paying to be at the top. Those that come just below are those that are using search engine optimization for the job. So, as the owner of a website, your web design company should have written your content carefully to ensure that it was optimized for search engines. If not, you simply threw away money and no one will ever find your website, no matter how cool it looks.
What is SEO?
So, SEO is the process by which a website is optimized so that is becomes visible on the organic search engines. The higher up your website ranks, the more visible it is. After all, do you ever trawl through pages of results when you are searching for something online? The majority of people don’t ever go past page two!
So, now let’s look at how search engines actually work. Thankfully, you can learn how to optimize your own website without actually understanding the complex algorithms that calculate how worthy your page is to relevant queries. There are in excess of 200 factors that Google alone uses when calculating page rank and the authority of a webpage. The page rank of your website will increase when someone links to your website, back linking being an extremely important part of your SEO campaign.
Websites are crawled, indexed, and ranked. When you enter a search query, your chosen search engine will dig into its indexes to find pages that match your query, sorting them to display the most relevant ones first. The order of the results is calculated by the algorithms of the search engines, taking hundreds of ranking factors into account; each page has its own ranking score.
So, let’s get back to your own webpages that have been written for you by your local web design company. There are different ways that you can ensure that they get ranked, white hat methods being the methods that you should use. Google is becoming stricter with the way it ranks your content, and if you try to manipulate the rankings using black hat methods, you will get penalized if you get caught. You may even get removed from the rankings altogether. Adding backlinks to your website and linking to other people’s content is still considered a white hat method for SEO. But, unlike in the past, you must link to relevant content, and avoid putting too many links in your content. Your SEO agency Boca Raton based can help you with all this, and much more.
Keywords
As we mentioned above, keywords are a vital part of your SEO campaign. If your content doesn’t contain the words that people are searching for, your webpages will never be found. But, it’s not quite that simple. Nothing really is that simple nowadays. Keyword stuffing will bring your ranking down, and may even result in penalization. Also, using keywords that are highly competitive is not the correct approach; this method will only work if you are a big name that has big bucks to spend on an advertising campaign.
So, how do you know which keywords to use? As a beginner to web design and SEO, using a local agency is the best way to learn about this topic. Where your keywords appear in your content can also change your rankings. So, although you may like to learn about SEO, your Boca Raton Florida SEO company is your best bet when it comes to getting content that will really improve the visibility of your website.
White Hat SEO Essentials
Anything that is too easy is not white hat. Buying backlinks used to be OK. It no longer is. Also the use of PBNs (private blog networks) is now severely frowned on. Content needs to be uploaded to relevant places. Comments you make on blogs must be relevant. And most importantly, your backlinks should be to authoritative sites within the same niche. Asides this, your content should be unique and original. After all, no one wants to read something that they have read before.
Internal and External SEO
Your search engine optimization campaign should be divided into two parts, internal and external. You need to concentrate on providing a great visual experience for people who find and visit your webpages and content. External SEO therefore includes ensuring that your website is added to local and national directories. It should also be mobile friendly and easy to navigate around for everyone, including for those with little computer knowledge.
Internal SEO is all about knowing what your site is about. If it contains the correct keywords, then it will be ranking for those keywords and will appear in rankings and listing. If your website is just page upon page of text, no search engine will know what it is about. Your pages need title, your images need alt texts, and your pages will need SEO descriptions. Of course, your Florida SEO company can take care of all of this for you, either by optimizing your content or by writing brand new content for you. Your website needs a clean structure and it should be properly organized so that it is easy to crawl and to be indexed.
Getting Links
There are two ways for your site to get backlinks, the first of these being by you adding links to other relevant content. The other is by other webmasters asking to link to you. In order for this to happen, you must make the effort to communicate with other webmasters within the same related niche. You can do this in many ways, social networking being one of the most common and most effective. The more inbound links your site has, the more popular it will become. Just remember, that search engines were built for humans, buy humans, so your SEO strategy needs to be logical well organized. To build your reputation, ensure that your site is easy to navigate around, provides unique information, and is listed with Google maps and places, Yelp, and other directories. For instance, you can link, to links that actually link back to your website and make those assets powerful also.
Final Note
Having a website is just the first part of your online marketing campaign. To become an online success, people need to be able to find you and your content. You need to provide a great visual experience for your potential clients, as well as a website that can be found in the rankings. Backlinks and internal and external SEO techniques from your local Boca Raton SEO company, as well as fresh new content for your website will ensure that your site becomes visible and ranks up where it deserves to be with the very best in your niche.