What is SEO? (Here’s Why You Need It.)

If your brand has a website, you’ve more than likely heard the term SEO before. SEO is a short, sweet, little acronym that encompasses a whole lot of techniques that help your website rank higher on search engines. Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is extremely important to your site; the higher your site ranks on a search engine, the higher your visibility and the more traffic you receive. 53% of organic search clicks go to the first result, so you can bet your bottom dollar this stuff is important. Unfortunately for us, it’s a lot easier said than done.

SEO is a complicated beast. It can take months of research to fully grasp and really understand SEO. There are many factors that come into play, including structure, user experience, link building, your content and keyword usage, and site performance. A quick search on Google will bring up hundreds of articles, but very little in the way of what constitutes good SEO, and what steps to take to improve your SEO. Additionally, SEO is always changing; as best practices for building websites change, so does SEO. Despite this, there are some basics that never change.

Here are some steps you can take to help improve your SEO:

1. Structure & User Experience:
   1. Web structure: A solid, in-depth web structure improves your chances of ranking high in Google’s search engine results. A web structure is the blueprint for a website. It needs to support and point to where users can find important information. Sitemaps help search engines and users find the pages they are looking for quickly, and also provide link building (see below) opportunities, which also strengthens your SEO.
   2. Tag optimization: Title tags, description tags, heading tags. Use all of the tags. These help search engines determine what your site is about and which search queries to display your site within the results for.
2. Link Building
   1. Links help your visibility and your domain authority. The more links that point to a page, the more useful Google interprets that page to be. A great number of links pointing to your page means your content is useful; other websites are pointing to it as a resource. Link building can be very time consuming, but creating shareable content, such as blogs, can help you increase your number of inbound links. Additionally, all links are not created equal. Some hold more power than others. Quality over quantity holds true when it comes to link building. It is better to have a few links from high quality, trusted sites, than many more from questionable pages.
3. Content & Keywords
   1. Make it original: Search engines dock points for duplicate content.
   2. Update frequently: This tells search engines that your site has all of your current data; this doesn’t mean you have to rewrite all your page content weekly; posting frequently to a company blog is a good way to accomplish this.
   3. Write for users, not for search engines: Keyword saturation is important, so make sure all of your keywords are worked in a couple times, but don’t overdo it. Search engines may actually rank you lower if your keyword saturation is too high. Making your content informative and helpful to visitors should be your top priority.
4. Site Performance
   1. Load time: Google rewards sites that load quickly, so it is important to make sure that your site loads in a reasonable time frame, not only for Google, but for your visitors also. In fact, 40% of people will leave a website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. You can check your site’s speed here.
   2. Mobile-friendly: As of April 21^st, Google’s search algorithm will be putting a lot of stock in whether or not your website is mobile-friendly. (Google says that in some fields almost 60% of Google searches are performed on mobile devices.) This means if your site isn’t equipped to handle mobile users, your ranking and traffic could suffer. This can also help your bounce rate.

SEO is an extremely important factor in ensuring your brand is found and connecting with the right consumers online. It can be a very time consuming process, but well worth the blood, sweat, and tears that no doubt will be shed. If you’re looking to enhance your web presence, Glint can help. Glint has partnered with clients to create unique, beautifully-designed websites and in-depth web strategies that will get your brand found online. Give us a call today to find out how we can help you reach your goals at (817) 616-0320, or e-mail us at agency@glintadv.com.

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