SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process to optimize your web pages to be found by search engines and communicate the nature of the content so the web page may be more relevant to someone make a search.   SEO is a complicated process involving many strategies and tasks.  However, the key point is to work to make the content on your website appealing to potential website visitors.

This presentation will go for search engine optimization, SEO for small business. The agenda, we will first discuss what is search optimization, then we’ll look at some examples. We’ll look at SEO strategy and finally look at reporting.

What is Search Engine Optimization?

So what is SEO or search engine optimization? Well, basically search engine optimization involves optimizing the results that occur in search engines. Search engines, such as Google and Bing, provide an index of the internet websites that are available. So the optimization is to making sure to try to get your website content into that search engine index. But there, people want good results. So search engines try to rank information by how relevant it is. So you want to try to make sure that your website content matches the search that has been pretty formed. But because there is so much content on the internet, the next one is to try and optimize to see if you can get better rankings, which basically means showing higher in the search engine results.

One thing to be aware of within search engine optimization is what is the searchers intent. This is basically what is a searcher looking for. So you want to try to align what they’re searching for with the content that you’re providing on your website. Additionally, you may be ranking or trying to beat out your competition. So you want to look to see if you can rank more higher, which is by going back to having more relevant information. Google is trying to provide the information the searcher intends to find by making sure it’s relevant to what their original search intent was. Search Engine, optimization like other things actually has no cost. Now, this is a direct cost in the sense of you cannot pay for placement. That’s actually a If you look at Google search ads, where you’re actually paying for getting a ranking, but again, to do search engine optimization, there is time involved. So it’s not true that there’s absolutely no cost. But getting in the search index is it does not cost anything, though again, the position that you would like may take effort to actually work toward obtaining.

In search engine optimization, SEO, you may hear a number of different terms. For example, black hat, black hat, really more is techniques that are trying to manipulate the search and results. For example, if you actually pay to have people link to your website, Google considers that a manipulation of the search engine results and actually may penalize you for that. It’s not to say these black hat techniques don’t work. It’s more of going against what Google is trying to produce, which is honest results. That show that people are actually interested in that information. The opposite is white hat. This is where you do follow Google’s guidelines on how to optimize your website to show up better. Google actually does want your website’s show better, because it helps them find the information and the US rank, show information so they can actually understand your website better. The major point that Google is trying to accomplish is to build your website for users. Kind of seems self explanatory, but some people are more emphasizing how to rank higher in Google as opposed to making sure that the user experiences good.

Examples

Next, let’s look at some examples of search engine optimization.

Google

So the first search engine that we want to look at is Google. It’s actually the most popular search engine out there. Again, it’s become a verb, you Google it. As far as optimizing, most people actually optimized for Google results. And again, that goes back to the fact that it is so Popular theme, there is the impression that a Google search result gives you the best answer. You know, everyone had might have their personal preference, but does see my Google is able to provide the best results. They also are constantly trying to improve their search engine technology through many, many updates.

Bing

The another search engine has been this is actually the second largest search engine. One of the keys that makes being very important is that it’s actually the default search engine in Microsoft Windows, which is on most computers that are purchased nowadays. So though most people optimize for Google being should not be completely forgotten.

Local SEO

There’s also another concept within search engine optimization. This is what we’ll refer to as local SEO. It’s more about how to optimize for different mapping websites. Now again, those mapping websites could be from Google and Bing But they have a different attribute as far as how they’re trying to rank. And actually it’s more of location based. So information about the user could be determined where they’re at. If they’re using it on a smartphone, they actually know your physical location. And so Google and their search engine results know this and said certain searches actually will show what they call a local pack. And this is a listing of businesses that might be near the person that’s searching. These also are affected by what’s called nap, which is the name, address and phone. So local search engine optimization is another aspect of search engine optimization that small businesses need to be aware of.

Pay-Per-Click

As I mentioned a little bit earlier, there is the concept of pay per click are paid results in search engine or search, paid results in the search engine result page. These are usually typically at the top they do call themselves out is actually But the reference is usually pretty small. They do show higher than what are called the organic results. So if you’re interested in actually ranking higher, there is a play to pay option where you can do this. The pay per click method comes in the fact that even though these ads are listed and shown, and as somebody clicks on them, they don’t actually have to pay for those ads. One nice thing about having this information has the rights to SEO is that there are search volumes that are published for people who want to learn which keywords to bid on. And then information can be used into organic SEO to kind of help you understand what are popular search terms.

SEO Strategy

Let’s talk a little bit now about SEO strategy.

SEO Audit

One of the first things is really important to look at when you’re looking at your website is to actually perform an SEO audit. This is a way to look actually at the search engine results. Your website currently has. This may show some different things that may be occurring such as configuration issues that you weren’t aware that you hadn’t set something up correctly. One of the worst ones is the fact that your website is not even being indexed by the search engines. There are also a number of recommendations for things on your website you can look at so an audit will help to find these information. It also will help you analyze your website traffic and see which traffic is being brought to your site via search engine as opposed to other things like referrals or if you’re doing paid. One of the most important things about SEO is the number of websites that link to you these are called backlinks. So an SEO audit can look at that analysis. And finally, since again, search engines are looking at the content your website and SEO audit can actually look at your content and make recommendations.

Keyword Research

When the most important things in search engine optimization is the concept of the keyword a keyword in this is how you rate back to what again, the searchers intent was what did they type into the search query saying Google? And do you have related keywords that match that searchers intent. Again, this is really optimization. So you’re looking at what your potential audience may be searching for. And then once you’ve kind of got some ideas there, the key is to start brainstorming keywords. And again, this is just a brainstorming effort. Once you’ve done that brainstorm, in effort, what comes out of it or what are called a seed keywords, these are these initial keywords where you can then finally start your in depth keyword research to determine many different keywords that you may want to look to optimize for there. There are many tools to help with this process. It’s not all manual.

On-page Edits

Next thing is talking more about our Page edit. So these are the things that actually wait to the individual pages. And again, Google is providing results based on web pages on your website. So each web page has some common attributes that Google looks at to try to identify what the content of that pages one is the website page title. The next are what are called headings, you may have heard of these as h1 or h2. Again, these are HTML tags that help to display different texts in different sizes. There’s also this concept of what’s called a meta description, that’s an individual short brief description of what the pages and because images don’t necessarily have content, but do relate to the content around them. There’s a way to actually provide text tags, alternative tags for each image so that image can be identified as what it may be about.

Content

Next, as part of your strategy is to look at the content that is the actual text on your website. Again, search engines look at the text content. But they also are now becoming smarter and smarter. So they’re actually looking about what the topics of your content is. Length does have a factor, number of images because again, this PR people like to look at images, they are good for communicating different things. readability, the actual How does your text read? People do just scan content sometimes. So is your content scannable? Do things stand out with headings and bullet points and things like that. And then within your website, the content can have internal linking and that is something else that Google looks at to see what other things about your website that this could be either more or less important about.

Link Building

So I mentioned earlier link building is another aspect of your SEO strategy. Link is basically when one’s website links to another site using hyperlink these are these, you know underscore things we click on to go to a different website, Google actually uses links as a fundamental ranking factor because having a link displays what we can call a vote of confidence. This is one of the reasons why Google kind of came out as one of the best search engines from, though it wasn’t one of the first was because of this concept of backlinking. There are many ways to get links. The simplest is just to ask people you know, or websites to link back to your information. There’s also the ability to maybe go into different types of website directories to add your website. But actually, this is deemed more of a natural process over time, if you produce good content, people will want to link to it when they discover it. And so this should be much more of a natural process.

Local SEO

As we mentioned before, again, another part of your SEO strategy needs to be looking at local SEO. Of course, if you have a physical business or if physical place. This is really focused around this concept of your name, address and phone numbers. There are a number of the citations that you can place around on different websites to show Google that yes, you are a business and you have this address and phone number. But it’s very, very important that all this data is very, very consistent. Also, part of a local SEO is your reviews. So Google looks at those to determine if you are servicing your clients well, and actually will use that as a ranking factor within the local SEO.

Reporting

That’s next talk about search engine optimization reporting.

Rank Tracking

One of the keys because it is where people find things is to look at your rank tracking. This is basically the position of your website in the search engine results. Most people don’t go much beyond the first few links and definitely not beyond the first page of results. So this is something to be aware of that if your ranking is Many magnitudes lower than the first page you may not ever be found. But ranking has become much more personalized when people are logged into our Google account, for example, and do searches, Google is actually tracking that to try to begin provide better information. So rank tracking needs to be kind of taken with a grain of salt. Because if you have a personalized experience, the rank of your website may or may not be the same from person to person.

Inbound links

So another thing to look at in your reporting is your inbound link profile. There are many tools available that can actually look at different links. They actually do their own crawling of the internet to provide this database of links, so you can find out who’s linking to it. But Google actually provides their own tool called the Google Search Console, which will show links to one of the nice things about this in addition to being free is Google index knows your links already. So it’s very, very accurate thing to look at, as far as reporting here is are your links growing over time? Because again, this will show that you’re becoming a much more authority site. Google has put out a tool to actually allow you to disavow links, because some links may have been done either from websites that you didn’t intend to, or from past efforts that may not match the Google guidelines. And so they’ve now provided a tool where you can say, Well, I don’t like that link.

On-page Configuration

One additional report that you can run is to look at your on page configuration. So even though at the beginning, an audit of this information is important, it does need to be an ongoing thing. And so basically, these tools will crawl your website and look for issues and thus show places where you need to make improvements. So again, SEO is not a one and done thing is something you need to continually be Looking at improving to help your rankings on the search engines.

Conclusions on Search Engine Optimization

So we’ll wrap up with some conclusions on search engine optimization. There are a number of benefits of search engine optimization. The first is to get your website listed higher in the search engine results. Because people do use the internet to do many different research topics, including finding businesses to provide services, websites that rank higher do get more clicks, and thus more traffic. Because you may be competing against other people within your industry ranking higher using search engine optimization will list you higher than your competitors in the US again, the higher you are, the more likely someone will click to look at the information on your website. Search Engine Optimization is an entire overall arching concept that does help your content may be more relevant and more relevant content helps the users that come to your website and Google then rewards all of that. And again, unlike paying for those top positions on the search end result, search engine optimization doesn’t have a direct cost but it does have a time cost.