Five SEO Basics You Were Too Embarrassed to Ask About

If you have beginner-level questions about search engine optimization (SEO) that you’re too embarrassed to ask, here’s your chance to find answers. We’ve created an SEO 101 guide that covers the basics of this crucial web strategy. Boost your brand’s online presence with these five fundamental facts about SEO.

1. SEO stands for search engine optimization. Search engine optimization is a process that entails using technical, creative, and relationship-building techniques to increase your website’s rankings within search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo.

2. SEO looks like this. When you optimize your website for search engines, they’ll list your brand’s web pages higher on a search engine results page (also known as a “SERP”).

3. SEO relies on three things. The goal of an SEO strategy is to convince search engines that your website holds information that is useful to the searcher. Before deciding which websites to show readers, Google considers whether the website results it displays are: 1) relevant (they contain words, images, and titles that relate to the searcher’s query); 2) trustworthy (they have accrued views from other users and have been linked to by other websites); and 3) easy to access (the websites’ content loads quickly and is mobile-friendly).

4. Basic SEO isn’t difficult. There are a number of small adjustments you can make to improve the SEO of your website:

• Make sure that all of the text on your website — especially the page titles, URLs, and meta descriptions of your pages — contains useful keywords and phrases that your audience is searching for.
• Check that the text on your site is actual text that can be read by a search engine (not text pasted within an image or video).
• Add relevant alt text to your images.
• Reach out to business partners and ask them to include a link to your website from their website.
• Inspect your website for outdated information and broken or empty pages.
• If your brand has videos posted on YouTube, add keyword-rich video descriptions and/or a transcription of the audio to the video page.

5. SEO helps drive marketing ROI. The last basic truth about SEO: it works. A strong SEO strategy can help your brand attract new customers, increase conversion rates, and ultimately drive sales. We’ve seen SEO boost ROI in a number of industries, and can help your business take the next step. Ready for SEO 102? We can take your brand way beyond the basics. Let’s get started.