Today, one of the first things a new business needs to do to be discoverable and boost sales is to have an online presence.  Because of the importance of showing up online, the internet is filled with millions of pages, with some businesses and websites getting lost.  Enter Search engine optimization.  Search engine optimization is the practice of getting targeted traffic to a website from a search engine’s ranking.  In other words, it helps your website show up higher on the google search engine.  Search engine optimization (SEO) is a very important tool for companies to use.  Common tasks associated with SEO include optimizing content around specific keywords, building backlinks, and creating high quality content.

There are two different kinds of SEO:  On-site and off-site.  Onsite SEO includes everything that you do to optimize your own website and pages.  Websites should be built for audience viewing.  Some people make the mistake of building their website according to search engine algorithms, which doesn’t really add very much value to the user.  Your website content should be genuine, honest and should add value to the user.  The more you focus on putting good content on your site, the better your chances are of being found, and visited in the future.  It’s important to optimize your website.  Some things you can do to optimize your site is to change your photos to jpegs.   This will take up less space.  Add alt text to your photos.  Add keywords to your page so google knows what can be linked to your site.  Add keywords into your posts, or write entire blog posts about keywords that will drive traffic to your site.  Make it understandable, and make sure their click takes them to the right place.

Offsite SEO is as important as onsite SEO because it is what points people to your website. Offsite is the most important thing to help your website to show up.  Yes, creating exciting website content will bring in organic searches, but you can speed up this process with the right promotion.  Gaining a good understanding of how other platforms work can help with offsite SEO.  Link building happens when other websites or blogs link back to your website.  This is referred to as backlinks.  It’s not all that easy to get, especially if your website’s content is not very exciting thus the need to create really good content.  Creating exciting and original content will provide value and will ultimately get more people and more websites linking back to your website.  Other sources of offsite SEO can include brand mentions, specifically by other companies or influencers.  It can also happen through guest blogging or having someone specifically post about their business on their blog.  Search for blogs that have the same focus as your website and invite collaboration.  There is also some risk in doing this because you have no control over what people say about your company or product on their website.  This makes it even more important to network and build relationships and keep your content positive and exciting. If your website has well written and valuable content, then people will want to link back to your website.  The more inbound links there are to your site, the more visitors you can have.  These should be links from highly respected companies and genuine websites.  This also includes Pinterest links and youtube links.

Onsite SEO ensures that your website is built on the relevance of the content in regards to search queries.  In other words, onsite SEO is the overall searchability of your website.  This would include factors like your page title, internal links, and images.  All of these play a big role in the optimization of your website.  Offsite SEO has more to do with the posts and links that take people to your website and bring in website traffic.  Every article that links to your website, every social media post that has your website’s content, and every post that includes your brand name is a win when it comes to good offsite SEO marketing.

How do you know where to start?  Onsite and offsite SEO are both important.  It might be a good idea to start working on onsite SEO first, because you need to have really good content before you can promote it.  Remember that even if you spend thousands of dollars on advertising your website or product, people won’t visit it if it has no value to them.  This is why it’s important to take the time to research your target audience.  Look at what other successful companies who have similar products are doing to drive people to their sites.  After your research, exhaust your options of other content marketing strategies including creating infographics, videos, and other multimedia that will add to the visitor’s experience.  

So why is SEO important?  If you are trying to have a successful business or sell a product, SEO is imperative.  Search engines serve millions of users per day looking for answers to the questions or solutions to their problems.  If you can provide answers or solutions with your product or service, you want people to be able to find your website.  Search engine users are likely to click on the top suggestions offered.  To take advantage of this and gain more traffic to your site, your website needs to appear in some of the top positions.  SEO can definitely put you ahead of your competition.  If two websites are selling the same thing, the search engine optimized website is more likely to make more sales and have more customer traffic. Users tend to trust search engines and having a place in the top few positions for the keywords the user is searching for will increase the website’s trust.  SEO is not just about search engines, but also good SEO practices enhance and improve the user experience and usability of a website.    In today’s competitive market, SEO marketing is more important than ever.