You may hear the word SEO, meaning search engine optimization, and be wondering what it is and why is it so important. Simply put, SEO is a tactic used as part of a larger marketing strategy to influence where pages and posts on your website appear on search engines. You do this by selecting keywords you want to rank for and then set up a page on your website dedicated to that keyword. Search engines then crawl the page and see it as useful content for searchers, pushing it higher in the results so more people will find it.
While tedious, basic SEO is quite simple and can be mastered by anyone – you just have to know where to start. Here are five components of SEO you can master and take advantage of right now:
-
Keyword: this is the word you want to rank for on search engines. It should be the topic or central idea driving the content of your post or page and should appear in all other SEO information, including the title, description, URL, and alt tags. Keywords should be relevant to your business and can be a word or multiple words.
-
Example: Basic SEO, website design in Philadelphia
-
-
SEO title: the title associated with your post or page that appears in search results as well as any link previews on social media or third-party websites. It is different from the H1 (otherwise known as the page title) and should include the title, company name, and location. It should be about 50 to 60 characters – not much shorter or longer.
-
Example: SEO for Small Businesses | Byte Size Digital | Philadelphia, Pa.
-
-
Meta description: a brief description, 120 to 158 characters, associated with your post or page that appears in search results as well as any link previews on social media or third-party websites. It should accurately describe your page in a way that will entice people to click through, especially since it’s the only description shown with the link.
-
Example: Showing up on the first page of Google goes a long way for generating business. Learn how to do basic SEO and improve your search rankings.
-
-
URL or slug: the link associated with your post or page. The URL is the link as a whole, including your domain, but the slug are the unique characters following the link that take you to the specific page. It should not be too long or include any stop words, such as to, and, but, or, etc.
-
Example: bytesizedigital.com/basic-seo
-
-
Alt tag: if an image doesn’t load properly or a viewer is using a screen reader, an alt tag is what shows up in its place. It should accurately describe the image, so if someone can’t see it, they will understand what the image is supposed to be and how it correlates with the page or post as a whole.
-
Example: man drinking coffee while working on his computer
-
By optimizing pages with basic SEO, more and more people will be able to find your website, which will then boost traffic to your website and generate more leads for your business. While this won’t happen overnight, using basic SEO best practices on everything you do will overtime generate a higher ROI. Want to learn more? Drop us a line at info@bytesizedigital.com.
