How does SEO work?

You may have heard that SEO is crucial to boost website traffic.

You must be found in Google Search, Bing, Yahoo, and others if you want to boost the number of people who visit your store, pick up the phone, and place online orders.

Your website’s optimization will help you rank higher and convert more searchers into paying clients.

Only 2-3% of searchers click beyond the first web page of search results. So even a small improvement in your search engine rankings can result in the website receiving more traffic and potential business.

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But How Does Search Engine Optimization Work?

Understanding how search engines work is only the first step in the process of improving a site’s search rankings. Improving a site’s rankings involves leveraging various SEO techniques to optimise the site for search.

In order to raise the rating of a piece of content and make a website more visible, SEO works by optimising the content of the website, doing keyword research, and obtaining inbound links.

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Search Engine Optimization

SEO stands for search engine optimization. It is a digital marketing strategy that focuses on getting traffic from free, organic, editorial or natural search results. Which improves your website’s position in search results on search engines like Google.

The higher a website is listed, the more people will see it.

How SEO Works

Search engines such as Google use an algorithm or set of rules to determine what pages to show for any given query. These algorithms have evolved to be extremely complex. They consider hundreds or even thousands of different ranking factors to determine the rankings of their SERPs.

What are 3 core metrics that search engines use to determine the quality of a site and how its ranking factors?

The search engine optimization process involves optimizing each of these core components of search engine algorithms in order to rank higher in the search results.

Content

Content marketing via blog posts or on a website page helps search engines discover you. Major search engines will read your page and will list it in relevant search queries.

Code

Since WYSIWYG editors and database-driven content management systems (CMS) are so common, the bulk of a website's source code—which helps determine the content and layout—is complex and vast. The best way to guarantee that your website is fully indexed by search engines is to design it in accordance with the most often used Web standards (basically less is more). Make sure that the title, META, and ALT tags on every page are optimised for keywords to complete source code optimization. The keywords you choose should be the same ones you concentrated on for the page's body copy. Make sure your domain is keyword-loaded, especially if the URL contains a dynamic string of database parameters, to earn bonus points (all of those nonsensical letters, numbers and symbols after the .com should be replaced with keywords).

Credibility

Trust is becoming an increasingly important factor in a site's Google ranking. This is how Google determines whether you have a legitimate site that visitors can trust. Therefore, you must establish trust with the search engine if you want to get a higher search engine ranking. The most effective way to do that is to obtain links from other sites relevant to your business that is both popular and easily found when searching for your key terms. The more well-known and pertinent a website that links to you, the more trustworthiness (or page rank) that website has with Google. The lack of popularity or relevancy of the pages that link to sites that employ link farms to increase their ranks usually results in penalties for those sites. When launching a link development effort, quality above quantity should always be the goal. Both on-page, off-page, and technical SEO aims to make your site more friendly, as well as trustworthy, to users and search engines. When search engine crawlers see how friendly your website is to them and its users, it increases the chances that your site will rank well for different searches.

Black Hat SEO, White Hat SEO, And Gray Hat SEO.

SEO Keyword Research

Relevant keyword research is often the starting point for SEO and involves looking at what relevant keywords a site is already ranking for, what keywords competitors rank for, and what other keywords potential customers are searching for.

Identifying the terms that searchers use in Google search and other search engines provides direction on what existing relevant content can be optimized. And what new relevant online content can be created.

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High-quality content is king. A website’s chances of achieving high search engine visibility are slim without keyword-loaded HTML language on all important pages.

What is invisible to search engines cannot be read by them. So it is unable to automatically determine what a picture or Flash animation represents or contains. And as a result, it will never assign that content as much weight.

Similar to this, frame-based websites provide an issue as users have trouble identifying several frames and typically just index one frame before departing.

Google searches for HTML text when indexing a website because it is simple to read and comprehend.

It’s critical to make sure your target phrases are consistently incorporated into the content of the page in question if you want to appear in the top 10 (or even the top 30) search engine results for any given search phrase.

As search engines like Google prefer the traditional thesis approach to page structure, don’t forget to put the terms in the headline, high up in the body material, and again at the bottom. And also in the Meta description tag and Title tags.

Additionally, seek for opportunities to highlight the phrase in the body copy by bolding, italicising, underlining, or linking to add pertinent content.

Keyword Stuffing

The most common black hat techniques include keyword stuffing, cloaking (hiding keywords in code so that users don’t see them, but search engines do), and buying links. Why would someone use black-hat SEO? Because ranking a site following Google’s guidelines takes a long time.

What Is Link Building?

External links

One of the most popular ways to build off-page SEO is through backlinks. Spamming other websites with your link building is a quick and easy way to get your site banned from search engines. Develop relationships with influencers and fans who create quality content and will link back to your site in their own content.

Internal links

Search engines crawl web pages by following links they've already discovered. So if you have a blog post and it's linked from your homepage, when a search engine crawls your homepage, it will then look for another link to follow and may follow the link to your new blog post.

Mobile Ready

You must make your content consistent across desktop and mobile devices and ensure your site loads fast on mobile and desktop. In short, you need to up your mobile game or site to not appear at the bottom of Google search results.

Google Ads

On Google and other search engines, the search results page often features paid ads at the top of the page. This is then followed by the regular results or what search marketers call the “organic search results”.

Traffic that comes via SEO is often referred to as “organic search traffic” to differentiate it from traffic that comes through paid search.

Paid search is often referred to as search engine marketing (SEM) or pay-per-click (PPC).

Google Search Console

Google Search Console (formerly known as “Google Webmaster Tools”) is a free tool provided by Google and is a standard tool in the SEO toolkit. GSC provides rankings and traffic reports for top keywords and pages and can help identify and fix on-site technical issues.

Google Ads Keyword Planner

Keyword Planner is another free tool provided by Google, as part of their Google Ads product. Even though it is designed for paid search, it can be a great tool to use for SEO since it provides keyword suggestions and keyword search volume, which can be helpful when doing keyword research.

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The talented team at Zero Three Digital provides quality SEO services. They know the techniques that WILL improve your search engine rankings and bring in more relevant organic traffic.

Contact us today to get started!

There isn’t a single SEO strategy that is superior to all others.
In SEO, the phrase “Well, it depends” is among the most frequently used terms.

You can go through and refresh your old content with new keywords and information. You could also include fixing broken links and checking them for accuracy.

Local SEO is an approach to search engine optimization (SEO) that makes your company appear more prominently in Google’s local search results. Local SEO is beneficial for any company that has a physical location or serves a specific region.

SEO best practices die, and new ones are created. So while it isn’t dead, SEO is always changing. If you want to succeed at SEO, you’ve got to be willing to roll with the punches. This is why you should hire a digital marketing agency to fulfil your SEO strategy needs.

The meta description on your website tells search engines a little bit more about what each page is about. This is also used by your human website visitors to better understand what the page is about and if it’s relevant. This should include your keyword and also provide enough details to tell the reader what the content is about.

Off-page SEO refers to SEO strategies that happen off your website.

You can generally see results take effect on the SERP once the webpage has been crawled and indexed by a search engine. But, SEO efforts can take months (6-12) to fully materialize.