SEO Guide: The Basics of Search Engine Optimization
Search engine optimization can make or break a company’s success. That’s why Internet Marketing Media Services has created this quick SEO guide. It’s to ensure that your organization understands the basics of SEO. It will help your team learn key concepts. These can speed up your workers’ site-building knowledge. The world of SEO can seem confusing and overwhelming. But don’t get discouraged. IMMS is here to guide you throughout your team’s entire site-building process.
What is Search Engine Optimization?
SEO is the act of boosting the quantity and quality of a website’s traffic. This allows your brand to get exposed to new visitors by appearing in organic search results. Of course, the ultimate goal is to convert those visitors into paying customers. In fact, SEO is more about people than it is about search engines. That is why your team must make the effort to understand what people are looking for online. They have plenty of questions. And it’s up to your company to put the answers in front of them. This means you have to know what specific words your targeted audience searches for. Having this information will help ensure your brand can connect with potential buyers.
What Takes Place Behind the Scenes During an Internet search?
Say someone inputs a search into a service such as Google. Google then scours across its index. Why? It looks for content that matches the search words. It solves the searcher’s query in a matter of milliseconds. During those milliseconds, an important action takes place. Google puts the results in a specific order. That order’s based on “relevance.” This is also called “ranking.” Say a search engine like Google ranks your website high. That means Google considers it to be relevant to the person’s query. This concept is one of the key reasons why IMMS exists. We make our clients’ websites rank high so an increase in traffic takes place fast. You want your brand’s content to get found on a consistent basis. And our team knows every trick in the book to make that happen.
How Search Engines Give People Results
Search engines are the modern-day encyclopedia. Their purpose is to answer people’s questions at a lightning-fast speed. There are billions of bits of information online. And search engines extract what they think the most important bits are. How do they do this? They catalog every piece of info across the internet. This includes websites, videos, pictures, and more. This process is known as “crawling and indexing.” The search engine then orders the information based on three different factors:
1) Ranking.
The search engine selects the content it believes will answer what someone inputted. For example, say someone searches for “best seafood in New York City.” The search engine has a ranking system in place for relevant seafood restaurants. The better the restaurant ranks, the more people will see it come up as a result.
2) Crawl.
Any search engine has content that matches “best seafood in New York City.” How did it get that content? By looking for codes and URL data that apply to the search. This is the crawling process.
3) Index.
A search engine has discovered data thanks to the crawling process. It now organizes and stores that data. This is indexing. Say a seafood restaurant’s website in New York City gets indexed on Google. This means that the site will show up as a result when relevant searches take place.
What Are Organic Searches?
This is when your brand’s website appears in search results thanks to having great SEO. (That’s the mission of IMMS.) What is the alternative to this? Paid SEO in which a company uses advertising to make their website show up in search results. This type of SEO is easy to see. Why? Search engines such as Google label these results as ads at the top of the results. The real, organic results are then listed below on all the SERPs.
What Are SERPs?
“SERP” stands for search engine results pages. They contain both organic results and paid advertising. The most dynamic organic results are “SERP features.” These features are those little boxes that answer people’s common questions. But they can also count as other criteria such as image carousels and “people also ask” sections. SERP features are continuing to change and evolve fast. This is another reason why your brand’s team should stay up-to-date on all SEO-related factors. What worked for a company’s SEO in 2016 might now be a thing of the past. Search engines adjust their SERP features on a constant basis. They do so based on what people are searching for. For example, say you search for “weather in Los Angeles” on Google. You will see a direct SERP result with the forecast. This will appear above all ranking websites such as weather.com.
Why Does SEO Matter So Much?
Sure, there are some platforms that can drive traffic to your brand’s website. Social media can do it and so can advertising. But what’s the king of generating traffic? Search engines. Organic search results will benefit your organization. In fact, they will help your team out more than almost any other tech-related factor. That is why your team shouldn’t depend on paid advertising. Organic searches will result in way more clicks than paid ads. Not to mention, your website will look more credible when it shows up in organic searches.
Take a recent business study as an example. It concluded that only 2.8% of searchers decided to explore their paid ad results. The following estimation will shock you. SEO features account for about twenty-times more traffic opportunities than paid ads. This applies to searchers using both a computer and a smartphone. Establishing great SEO is an investment in your company’s long-term future.
Other marketing channels do not offer the long-term stability that SEO does. The simple act of posting a piece of content with relevant keywords can get your website to rank high. That traffic is likely to continue over long periods of time. But paid advertising requires your company to continue to shell out big chunks of money.
SEO Guide: The Importance of Meta Descriptions
Recognizing the importance of meta descriptions is crucial for having great SEO results. Sure, a title tag is effective when it comes to a search listing’s headline. But your meta description is great for serving as your site’s extra ad copy. Keep in mind that a meta description functions as an HTML element.
The HTML can get updated into the code of any website. But visitors to a website are not going to see the code. Sometimes meta descriptions do not show up in Google’s search results. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t still attempt to create the descriptions.
The chance of increasing site traffic makes meta description-building worth the effort. The key is to create a compelling description of why your brand/website matters to people.
IMMS Will Guide Your Brand Toward SEO Perfection
Search engines often make adjustments to their algorithms and ranking systems. Many people speculate that they do so on a daily basis. This is why your team can’t afford to wait to take action. Give us a call right now for a free consultation. Our team of experts will listen to your own team’s goals and expectations. Next, IMMS will create a customized SEO game plan. The plan will ensure that your company receives winning longterm results. We will optimize your website in no time. This is so you can reap the rewards of increased traffic that will lead to increased revenue.