post by Stephanie Nelson
I’ve written quite a few SEO-related posts lately. As a result, I’ve gotten the question “what is SEO” more often than usual.The short story is that SEO stands for search engine optimization. But here is a bit more of an explanation.
When you’ve done an internet search, you’ve probably noticed when the results come up, there are some marked as ads and some aren’t. The ones that aren’t marked as an ad are considered organic results, meaning the search engine determined the information on that page as a good match for your search term. Search engine optimization (SEO) is the method for helping the search engines “see” your website for terms for which you want it to be found. This involves “optimizing” multiple elements of your site based on the criteria the search engines look for in ranking websites for their organic results. These elements include the title tags, your on-page content, the alt data for images, and the meta description for the page, among other things.
But it’s not enough just to put your keywords in these areas. In fact, depending on how you put your keywords in these areas, the search engines could see your efforts as keyword stuffing. The search engines don’t like keyword stuffing and could potentially not show your site at all if that’s what they think you’re doing. There are best practices around how your title tags should be laid out, how often your keywords/search terms should appear in your content, how many characters your title tags and meta descriptions should have, etc.
Another element the search engines consider in on-page SEO is your linking strategy. The search engines look for internal links (links that go to another page within your site) and external links (links that go to another site). There’s also a value placed on your link’s anchor text (words within your copy vs “click here”).
In addition to SEO work needed on each page of your website, there is off-page work needed if you’re looking for a full-scale SEO strategy. Full-scale SEO involves work such as guest posting on blogs outside of your own, an inbound linking strategy, online directory listings with keyword-rich descriptions, and more. Adding this additional layer to your SEO strategy expands your potential for SEO results, but it also adds to the cost of your SEO implementation. (NOTE: SBN Marketing does not offer full-scale SEO, but if this what your business needs, I’m happy to refer you to some of my counterparts that do.)
So that’s a brief overview of SEO. There are even more elements to SEO work that I’m happy to discuss with you during a site audit. If you feel your site needs some SEO work, give me a shout! Let’s talk about all of the elements you need and that SBN Marketing provides, the costs, and how we can make it all work for you!
