SEO (or “Search Engine Optimisation”) is considered one of the world’s most powerful digital marketing techniques used to improve your business website’s ranking and visibility in the search results of search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo! and others. With SEO, companies can attract and drive more “organic” visitors (i.e. free visitors who find and come to your website through search engines), generate higher-quality leads, and sell more items/services without relying exclusively on paying for advertising.
While every business needs a strong presence online, the level of competition in both traditional and digital marketing make it essential for companies to have an effective way of reaching their target audience and SEO is one of the best methods of accomplishing this goal.
SEO is accomplished by optimally designing various different elements of your site (e.g. page title, URL, and headings) so that search engines can easily “digest” your site’s content and then rank it higher in the results pages of search engines when users search for products and/or services related to what your business offers.
When someone goes online to look for something (whether it be a specific product, service or information), they use one or more of the many search engines that are available to them and when they enter their search term(s) (keywords) into one of the search engine’s, results are returned with the highest-ranking sites at the top of the results page and the remaining adds. Naturally, the higher the ranking of the site in the search engine returns, the more people visit the site, and businesses that depend on generating website traffic from searches stay ahead of their competition by using a combination of effective SEO techniques.
There are three main types of SEO: on-page SEO, off-page SEO, and technical SEO.
**On-page SEO** involves optimizing the content and structure of a website. This includes conducting keyword research, optimally configuring specific on-page elements such as headings, title tags, URL structure, and the use of ALT attributes (text describing images) on images, and the use of links both internal and external. Keywords are the words that are entered by individuals into search engines when searching for products and/or services.