SEO is a hot topic these days, but what does it really mean? SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and it’s the process of improving your website so that it ranks higher in the search results. It’s not something that can be done overnight, but if you follow some basic best practices and implement them correctly, you will see positive results over time.
SEO encompasses a lot of different tactics, ranging from on-page optimizations to link building. This can be overwhelming, so let’s start with the basics.
Search Engine Spiders
These are programs that crawl the web indexing pages for search engine results. Search engines use these spider data to create their indexes (aka databases) to make it easier for users to find relevant content when they search for something specific on their websites.
Keyword Research
This refers specifically to researching what keywords people are using when they look for products or services similar to yours online—and determining which keywords you should target to get more traffic from searches where those phrases are used as part of the query.
Keyword Stuffing
The number of times a keyword appears throughout your website can have a direct impact on how well it performs in search results. Keyword stuffing—or overusing keywords unnecessarily—can hurt your rankings by making Google think that no one is reading through all that text because it’s all about the same thing.
Meta-Description Tags
Meta description tags are used by search engines to describe your website. They’re not displayed on your website, but they do appear in the search results. The meta description tag should be between 150 and 160 characters long – this will depend on the character limit that’s set for each search engine. For example, Google allows up to 300. If you want to add extra emphasis on certain words or phrases, use quotation marks around them so they link back to specific keywords and phrases that you’ve targeted with your content marketing efforts.
Schema Markup
Schema markup is a way to help search engines better understand your website. It’s a form of structured data that lets you add information about your business, like your address and contact details, directly into the code of your website. This helps Google display it in search results and other places on the web.
Schema markup can help you rank higher in Google News because it signals to us that you have an article or story ready for publishing on our platform. Some websites also use Schema data to show rich snippets (search result blocks with extra information) in mobile searches, which can increase clickthrough rates as well as lead generation potential.
Schema markup also helps local businesses show up more prominently within map results when customers search for local businesses.
As you can see, SEO is a very diverse field that can be applied to many different aspects of your website. However, the main goal should always be to make your website as easy for search engines to read and understand. The more relevant topics are covered in your content, the easier it will be for people looking for those specific things to find what they’re looking for!
