The Key Components of SEO: Gain a Basic Understanding of SEO

We are focusing on educating people as to why SEO is important.

Does the topic of SEO make your head spin? You know it’s important—everyone’s talking about it—but what is SEO and why do you need it?

This article will break down SEO into its simplest form, giving you a high-level overview of SEO and a better understanding of how it works.

Let’s start with a few definitions you will need to know to understand what SEO is all about.

SEO

SEO is an acronym for Search Engine Optimization.

In order for a website to be found (think of your website as the answer) when someone searches for something (or asks a question), it must be optimized for search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo) to find it.

Companies build a strategy around what potential customers search for on search engines—based on their industry and keyword research—to move their company up on the results page of a search engine/customer query (or Google search).

SEO is a cost effective way to reach your target customers via a website that works FOR you to reach next-level sales!⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀

Here are some topics that go into SEO. This article focuses on ranking, backlinks, and content.

Crawlability

Crawlability is a word used to describe when search engines, like Google, discover your website and can crawl your website. The idea of crawling is this: Google bots read and index the content that is on your website.

What affects crawlability?

Crawlability is affected by the website's structure and internal link structure.

Indexing

Indexing, in the context of SEO, is the process of organizing the content found on your website during the crawling process. After the bots read through your website, they start “indexing” (or sorting and analyzing) the content found on your website. It is then put into categories.

To help make your website easy for search engines to index, we recommend having meaningful title pages that are short and straightforward. Focus on the words you use—and, if you choose to use images throughout your website, describe the image (with alt text) so the search engine can understand what the image is and means.

We recommend reading through this blog to understand how crawlability and indexability affect SEO.

Ranking

Ranking in search engines requires a website with flawless technical SEO, relevant content, and a high authority score.

Content is considered relevant if your website provides information that best fits the query that is searched by the consumer.

Authority

In life, we are more apt to trust people who are an authority or expert on an issue. Well, search engines work the same way. If a website has a high authority score, it has a better chance of being recommended to an end user by a search engine.

For example, Web MD almost always comes up on the first page of search results for health related questions. That is because the site provides relevant content and is considered an expert or has a high authority score.

How can authority be built?

Authority is built through backlinks, and content that is referred to and talked about often. Authority is a big part of your ranking on search engines. Authority can also be built through providing relevant content and links. You need to make sure that your content is in line with the keywords that you use so you do not confuse your audience and the search engines. If you connect your keywords to your content and your proper target market, your content will be relevant and the search engine will recognize your site.

To learn more about authority, please read through this article about how to build an authority site.

Backlinking

Backlinking occurs when a website links to your website—or when your website links to another website. Backlinking can build your authority quickly, especially if you link your site to other reputable (or high authority) sites. What’s even better: a reputable site mentions your website or a product you sell. This is where PR can come into play.

We recommend watching this short clip on backlinks to learn more about backlinking, since it is such an important part of SEO.

Sitemap

Another important thing to note when it comes to SEO is the idea of site mapping. Sitemaps are a file of code that lives on your web server. Sitemap’s list all of the relevant URLs your website is carrying.

Providing a sitemap to search engines can help your site be read more quickly and efficiently. Sitemaps expedite the process of SEO. It is especially important to provide search engines with a sitemap if your website is new, if the links are not easy to crawl, or if your site has a lot of rich media like photos and videos.

IMPORTANT PRO-TIP: Submit a sitemap to each search engine after you make changes to your website.

To get help with your SEO strategy from the Tiny Marketing House, submit a contact form.