The 4 Basic Principles of Search Engine Optimization

You’ve probably heard of Search Engine Optimization, but do you truly understand what it means or how to utilize it? Search Engine Optimization (SEO) focuses on increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website by using organic search engine results to your advantage. By increasing the quality and quantity of traffic to your website, you will be able to effectively boost your brand awareness. In short, when your potential customers are searching the Internet, you want to make sure you are using proper tactics to make sure your page appears first on the results list. This article is going to go through some of the basic principles of Search Engine Marketing for your business that will help you get the ball rolling in the right direction.

1. Keywords

While this may sound straight forward or irrelevant, the keywords you are using have a tremendous impact on your SEO. Researching the keywords that will be most relevant to your industry will allow you to pinpoint how your target audience is thinking and what it is they are looking to get out of your page. There are many free to use tools out there that analyze exactly how many people are searching for a particular term and the competition surrounding it.

Check Out These Free and Easy Keyword Planning Tools!

2. Backlinks

A backlink is a hyperlink that is placed strategically within a blog post or otherwise that redirects traffic to another web page (similar to the article linked above). Backlinking is beneficial to SEO efforts because it is a good indicator of a site’s popularity and importance to a particular search. It is important that when you are backlinking to another website, it is relevant to the topic at hand because Google has recently altered their algorithm to prevent deceptive backlinking techniques.

3. On-Page SEO

On-Page SEO refers to the actions you take on your own website to boost traffic. The content on the website, HTML source code, meta data, title tags, and descriptions all factor into your search engine results. Google uses this information to assess what your viewers are looking at when they enter your site and then determine if this content is considered high-quality (so make sure it is!).

4. Off-Page SEO

On-Page SEO refers to the actions you take outside of your own website to boost traffic. This could include your social media pages, social bookmarking, and other various promotions ran elsewhere. Similar to what is mentioned above, Off-Page SEO is an important element of increasing your relevance in the search engine and should not be ignored.