The Beginner's Guide to SEO

SEO can do wonders for a business that's seeking to use the Internet as a way of generating more revenue, but what is it exactly? SEO stands for search engine optimization and consists of making it so that search engines like Google will favor your website/pages so that more people land on it. Why is this powerful? Think about it this way, who is more likely to buy your services and/or products, someone who sees a random ad and clicks on it on a whim, or someone actively searching for what you have to offer? The answer is obvious, and that's why the best SEO companies consider it such as great strategy.

On-Page SEO

SEO primarily comes in two forms: on-page and off-page. On-Page SEO consists of various keywords or keyword phrases. These are the same phrases that people are typing into the search engines to find what they are looking for. For example, if someone wants to find a dentist in Denver, they might type "best dentist in Denver" into Google and browse the results that come up.

Of course, if you're a dentist in Denver, you want your practice to be the first one to pop up in the search results since, statistically speaking, the higher up a link is in the results, the more people will click it.

To do on-page SEO like an expert digital market leader, you have to make sure that the keyword phrases you are targeting show up on your web pages so that Google can find them and rank them accordingly. What you don't want to do, however, is to "keyword stuff," which is when you put a ton of the same keyword phrase on a page over and over again. This will only get you a penalty from Google and other search engines.

Off-Page SEO

The counterpart to on-page SEO is off-page SEO, and it's a little more complicated. When a website gets links to it from other websites, it gains "authority." Authority is a factor that helps Google to know what sites to rank high in the search results. Getting links from high authority sites passes on that authority to the sites they link to. What this means is that you want your site getting links from high authority sites.

If you own a local business that operates in a specific area, you can do this by creating directory listings on directory websites, then linking back to your main website. This will give you lots of "link juice," which is just another way of saying authority. The more power your site has, the higher it will rank, and the more visitors it will get.

Geo-Targeting

One thing to keep in mind when it comes to SEO is the area that you're targeting. If you run a business that operates only in a particular area, then you don't want to make your SEO efforts to broaden and connect with people who can't possibly use your services because of distance. Likewise, if you do business on a national or international scale, you want to make sure that your reach is appropriate.

Geo-targeting depends on a lot of different factors, but having a Google My Maps listing and various directory listings can help the search engines to understand the scope of your business, and apply the SEO in a way that makes sense for your business.

Hiring the Pros

Above all else, don't forget that there are professional SEO firms out there that can do all the SEO for your business from start to finish. You can even work out deals with the best SEO companies so that they do schedule audits to make sure that your SEO is working the way it is supposed to be, and make changes if needed.