05 Apr SEO and YOU

Anyone with an online presence needs to be aware of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). SEO allows people to find you faster through more than one channel and broadens the viewer base you have in any online endeavor. Whether you run a blog, a business, or an online hobby, the internet is all about visibility. You need to be visible to be seen. SEO is what makes people more visible on the web. It can be the difference between not breaking 100 views on a webpage and skyrocketing into thousands of views daily.

Who Needs SEO?

Anyone who takes the internet seriously needs SEO. Anything from a business to a pastime requires some level of consistent engagement and visibility. Without views, your presence online basically doesn’t exist. It’s not enough to just put stuff out there and expect it to be seen. And it’s also not enough to share it around with friends. Your friends or family will always spare a moment to look at what you’re doing, but will they spare a dollar? Will they remember what they saw later on? SEO elevates your presence to be more memorable so that a much wider reach of people can know what you have to offer.

How to Use SEO

Improving SEO isn’t a one-time solution. There’s no one program you can download to do it all for you. It’s a matter of self-improvement, a constant cycle of adding content and managing keywords to make yourself more relevant than the competition. 

The main way to boost SEO is through content creation. Producing original content centered around your presence gives it a boost to user engagement. Anything from written content like blogs or eBooks, visual content such as unique graphics and videos, or audio content like podcasts and adverts applies. Make new things, and people will see them. Reusing old content or pre-existing content doesn’t have the same effect. Stock photos lose out to real photos that have no previous source but you. 

When someone sees your content for the first time, it should lead them to you no matter where they found it. This drives engagement and is the whole goal of SEO.

Keys to the Words

The content you make can include anything relevant to your goal, but you must include keywords. These are, clearly, the most relevant words to your content, which can summarize it best for the automated cataloging process. Keywords are what search engines use, and picking the best ones helps optimize your content to be more easily found through the search engine. Hence, Search Engine Optimization.

Choosing the right keywords makes a lot of difference. Instead of describing a storefront with just an “online store,” add the items available in the major descriptors. Or, use keywords relevant to other features. “International shipping,” “locally sourced,” “small business”; think of how you would search for your website by anything other than its name. Those who don’t know what you do will have to find you by guessing different words, so using clearly identifying keywords will put you in the niche that best suits you. Using nothing but popular ones won’t make you stand out as easily, but it will add you to a far wider search pool where more people will be likely to search through.

SEO Speedrun

There’s no easy way to tell just how long changes will impact SEO results. Any change made to the face of a webpage, or any new content added, will put your website back into the search pool brand new. This means that if you made a change for the better, you might see results immediately. Or, if you made a change for the worse, you might not see the impact for a while.

The factors for ranking SEO are based on overall user satisfaction towards the content. First, content must be of good quality. Bad articles will bet low views because they won’t be shared and spread through links on other websites, which is one of the most reliable ways to get traffic. Certain browsers won’t access your web page if it’s not secure, and some may struggle to load your web page if it’s not well designed. More people are using mobile to search for content now, so you need a mobile-friendly design that can be accessed through phones. 

Maintaining all of these things is essential to achieving a high Page Rank, the numerical value associated with certain search results. The goal of any SEO is to get you on the front page of Google or other search engines, and the dream is to get near the top, to be the first thing people see when they type in a search not just for your website by name but by description and content.

Search For Results

There’s a lot to consider when trying to improve SEO. The factors vary greatly from website to website. Different businesses have different strategies and different keywords associated with them. For anyone starting online who needs some traction to get started, some pointers can help:

Get used to Keywords and figure out the best ones for you. Check on the competition. If there’s someone who already has what you want, figure out how they got it and replicate it without plagiarizing. Stay up to date on your niche; culture is always changing, and online, it changes extremely fast. Engage with the right kind of social media. Not every website needs to go to the same lengths to be visible. Plan out your content ahead of time, research to understand what will be the most attractive to the audience you want.

Always Improving

SEO is a daily function. It’s something to keep in mind, along with every other working part of what makes a website function. As the internet changes and the culture around internet content changes with it, there will be new ways to use SEO in the future that aren’t known yet. There’s unlimited space online; it’s an infinite sea of data. Do what you can to stay above the surface and be seen as much as you can.