SEO Basics: How to Optimize Your Website for Search Engines & what most people miss

SEO is a crucial aspect of every website. It’s how search engines discover your site on the internet. Did you know there are 5.9 million Google searches per minute? That’s an astronomical number! While Google is the giant, Bing is the second most popular search engine, powering DuckDuckGo as well. Organic SEO is a long-term strategy compared to paid ads. With paid ads, if you invest $100, you get exactly $100 worth of ads. However, with SEO, investing time and a bit of money can yield exponential returns.

On-Page SEO

Indexing: Are your robots.txt file and sitemap.xml file published? These documents guide how search engine crawlers interpret your site. Google’s crawler uses the sitemap.xml file to understand your site’s structure and index your pages.

Speed: Is your website slow or bogged down with JavaScript from your page builder? Page speed can affect your SEO. While it may not be a direct ranking factor, faster speeds mean a better user experience. A more efficient navigation experience indicates to Google that your site has value. Faster speeds also decreases the amount of time it takes for Google to crawl your site, increasing your crawl budget.

Updated Titles & Meta Descriptions: This is one of the most important things you can do. Accurate descriptions help Google quickly understand what your page is about and improve your click-through rate (CTR), which is the ratio of impressions to clicks. This is vital for drawing people to your site.

Content: Content, content, content! This is the key to SEO. No amount of perfecting your title tags, updating your H1 tags, or ensuring your site is speedy will replace the importance of great content. The internet’s purpose is to provide information, so publishing helpful information is essential for your SEO. If you need help with content creation, seek assistance from our friends at Savage Content Collective.

Off-Page SEO

Backlinks: Backlinks indicate domain or site authority, showing that your site is trustworthy. Backlinks should be very carefully placed and placed organically. For example, we only sponsor events & charities that offer us a backlink in return on their site. We do not buy backlinks from 3rd party places.

Social Media: Social media posts can drive traffic to your site. Some might wonder if this is SEO or marketing. The short answer is SEO is marketing! While there’s no explicit technical benefit to posting your site on social media, it builds brand awareness and social signals. Visitors may Google you if they want to return to your site.

Google My Business: Ever Googled “plumber repair near me” and seen listings with locations, phone numbers, addresses, and reviews? That’s Google My Business! It’s a service that helps your business appear higher in searches, including your link in directory listings.

Google has thousands of data points, and since they own the entire search experience, there’s no single magic bullet to make you appear first on Google. This is a basic starter guide, and I encourage you to explore more SEO tips and tricks online!

What should I watch out for?

There’s lots of agencies out there that promise SEO optimization, but do they really give the care & attention that your site deserves? As with everything, there are good and bad agencies out there, but it’s easy to get taken advantage of with SEO. Use these basics as a starter for making sure you can ask the right questions and ensure you’re getting the best service you can from your agency.

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