SEO 101: What is SEO and How Does it Impact Your Business’s Website?

It is a common practice today for companies both large and small to have websites and e-commerce platforms. Often, young marketers, business owners, and entrepreneurs wonder why their sites aren’t doing as well as they had assumed they would, or they and wonder how to get more traffic. In today’s digital landscape, building a functional website is not enough to entice online sales. Instead, there must be a robust digital marketing strategy with a strong emphasis on SEO or search engine optimization. Many people ask exactly what is SEO,  and how does it work, and how will it help my business/blog/portfolio/ eCommerce website?

SEO or Search Engine Optimization is the steps that you take to ensure that your web content is visible and high ranking in search engines, like Google or Bing, which will then increase traffic to your website. The good news is, you don’t have to be an expert web developer or marketing strategist to implement some basic SEO practices. There are several extremely simple steps that can be taken to do SEO correctly.  If you are just getting started, here are a few rules of thumb that are easy to implement and should always be kept in mind.

Initial Rules of SEO:

1. Writing for search engines. While your site should always be as user-friendly for real users as possible, it’s always important to keep in mind that search engines will crawl your site as well and need to be able to clearly understand the content your site offers. This means writing clearly, using keywords consistently across meta titles, alt text, and other features, and using internal links to show the crawlers where you want them to go.
2. Keyword research. There is very little point in writing content that no one is looking for. Ensure your content and website serve users by answering a question or speaking to a pain point that they may have that is causing them to go to a search engine and try to find an answer. Give users a reason to come to your site. The more users come, the more search engines will agree that your information is important, and the higher you rank. As you rank more highly, you will get more traffic. The perfect combination for SEO.
3. Consistently good content. The more engaging and well-written content that you create, the more relevant search engines will assume you are. When optimizing for SEO, it’s important to remember that it is not a “set it and forget it” scenario but instead a constant need to review, add, and optimize to get the most out of your efforts.

If you can start with a mastery of these simple items, your site will begin to see an increase in traffic, users, and leads. You will see that your rankings will grow and with it, the relevancy of your website to customers. SEO  truly gives smaller players in the market the ability to compete if they can create relevant content and accomplish optimization better than their competitors. It evens the playing field and makes it easier to increase web traffic. Search engine optimization done properly is an art form and once mastered, it can provide big returns. 

Blog based on an original blog post by Past PYP President Mackenzie Farone-Waite, MBA from MF Digital Marketing.filed under: Press Release