Why SEO is so Essential
If you’re reading this right now, you have probably built your own website. Whether it’s for business, creative, or personal reasons, the fundamental purpose of embarking on this long digital journey can be whittled down to one thing: reaching your audience. Bloggers and creatives seek to express themselves and share their work. Business owners sell a product or service. No matter what, we are all here to be seen.
This is something that many people question while in the early stages of a site. Now that you’ve put all this time, effort, and maybe even money into this virtual world you’ve created, how will people find it in the vast, congested space that is the internet?
Well, there’s already a built-in way to reach your desired audience organically through your website: SEO. Often, CMS platforms will have the essentials of SEO ready to go. However, knowing the best practices will make your website stronger and more accessible to internet searches.
What is SEO?
SEO, or Search Engine Optimization is a process that drives more traffic to your website as well as overall visibility. When we implement SEO in our websites, it gives search engines the information that it needs to show your site to people you want to reach. It is one of the most important aspects of website management.
There are many components to good SEO, it comes with a set of best practices to ensure that the right people are reaching your content. Moz.com’s guide to SEO provides a helpful resource to break down these practices formatted like Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, shown here:
Best Practices Explained
Snippets and Schema Markup
When we are searching for something on the internet, we are met with pages of results. However, most people will find what they are looking for on the first SERP, or Search Engine Results Page. This is because of SEO. Search engines use a process called “crawling and indexing” through a language called Schema Markup to sort through the infinite content that exists on the web to facilitate our needs.
Schema Markup, also called “structured data” is written into the code of a website, search engines will use this to identify and understand a website. This is important to identify and write into our websites is what these engines comb through to effectively rank these sites to correspond to a search.
Title, URL, and Description
Moving on, titles, URL’s and meta descriptions are another part that further assists search engines in their indexing. These all play a part in your website ranking, and knowing how to optimize them is a simple and effective way to garner visibility and Click Through Rate (CTR).
One key step in writing your title, URL’s, and description is to keep things concise.
The slug or permalink sections of your URL can be typed out to avoid random characters and symbols that may appear when you automatically generate a link. This provides more clarity and a clean URL for search engines to read.
When writing titles and description, Tell users what the page is for and why they should click your page. Be mindful of your character limit so these don’t end up getting cut off. You’ll also want to provide unique information or include CTA’s (call to action) in these tags, especially in your meta descriptions to help bolster your CTR.
Keywords
This leads into the use of keywords, which are a helpful tool to specify what types of visitors you’re looking to attract. Before jumping into a keyword search, you must first understand your audience and how they will perceive your content. Knowing the types of people you want to reach, what they want, and why they should care about your website will guide you through the process. Then, you can jump into what keywords you should use.
There are many sites that can help you in this process, I like to use Google Trends since it’s simple and accessible. From there, you can narrow down your keywords by industry, interest, purpose, and more to find out how to us these keywords to your advantage while writing your SEO and content.
Content, User Experience, and Accessibility
The content of a website, facilitated by its design also play a major role in SEO. As you saw in Mozlow’s Hierarchy above, content should be “compelling and share-worthy.” While creating content for the web, we must be cognizant of the fleeting attention economy of today along with user expectations while browsing a website. This affects the pages we make and how they are designed alike. Content should be visually-focused and appealing, with appropriate and engaging images and design choices. Text should be straightforward, informative, and inviting, as many visitors will not want to scroll for long.
The speed, responsiveness, and compatibility of your website also matters in both user experience and SEO. Optimal HTML code is imperative for quicker loading times, so try to condense as much as possible, especially when using CSS and JavaScript, prioritizing the amount of content over code. Search engines factor all of these in their ranking, so it’s important for websites to properly meet these standards of accessibility, otherwise your website might be hidden from web searches.
There are tools available to assist in this more complex process. Screamingfrog’s SEO Spider is a great tool to check your website’s SEO, in order to test your site and understand how it could improve. Google Search Console is an another helpful tool to see how your website appears to search engine bots and further optimize it for ranking.
While SEO might seem complicated, it is not only worthwhile to complete these steps, but also necessary for your website to reach as many visitors as possible. I hope you found this overview of SEO informative and helpful in your site-building experience!