Anyone who contends the deeply digital nature of the modern economy has been living under a rock for at least the better half of the last two decades. The internet has now become almost all-encompassing. From entertainment to essential life services, everything has moved online.
The same ultimate truth applies to the world of business. A cursory glance at the list of the top ten companies in the globe reveals that well over half of them are directly associated with technology while the rest rely heavily on it.
Small and medium-sized businesses that fail to leverage internet technologies in day and age will not survive by the mid of this decade and this is a fact, no matter how harsh it sounds.
Now that we have been able to scare you enough, you must be asking yourself, how can I leverage the internet to expand my own business. The answer is as simple as the question itself, curate and establish a well-thought-out digital presence.
There are several ways of doing so, from social media websites like Facebook to e-commerce platforms like Amazon, you can choose to be present on several platforms to increase the amount of exposure your business is garnering.
But establishing a presence on third-party platforms is just not enough. Every good business person understands the importance of ownership. And in that spirit, you must build your online presence using a platform that you own. Yes, you guessed it right, we are hinting towards building your own website.
And while building a website is easy enough, you can either hire a professional web developer to create a website from scratch, which will be expensive but will pay its own dividends or you can use one of the many online tools like Wix and WordPress to edit existing templates, this approach will have some limitations but is adequate for small businesses with limited budgets.
But when it comes to websites it is not building them that is the difficult bit, but bringing them to light that gives many markers jitters. The logic is simple enough, what good is a website if it is not being exposed to potential customers.
This is where SEO comes in. At the very basic level, SEO refers to the set of techniques and strategies webmasters deploy to ensure that their websites appear on the first page of Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs). Because if a site is not appearing on SERPs, you might as well have not created it in the first place.
I am sure these simple statements were enough to help your grasp the central importance of SEO. And this blog post is directed towards helping you understand the three main facets of SEO so that you have a basic framework on how to implement a good SEO strategy.
But before we jump on to the three-pointers we must talk about some basic hardware. You cannot hope to implement any viable SEO strategy without having access to a high-speed internet connection. So, if you are still dependent upon DSL or a slower cable internet connection, it’s about time that you upgraded to a more reliable and established internet service provider like Spectrum.
Now, that we have your internet situation under control let’s take a quick look at the three main types of SEO and what they entail.
1.) ON-PAGE SEO
As the name suggests on-page SEO refers to the implementation of SEO best practices on your own website. The most essential part of on-page SEO is content curation. You need to make sure that you create content that meets Google’s criterion of ‘expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness.’
In short, you should have sufficient command over the topics you are writing on and your content must be able to give value to readers.
Another key thing you need to keep in mind is keyword research. Keywords are basically queries people right on Google in search of particular results. You should have a clear idea of what type of keywords you want to rank for, the difficulty of these keywords and the volumes these keywords are garnering.
Spread and embed these keywords across your content and wait for the magic to happen.
2.) OFF-PAGE SEO
Again, as the name suggests off-page SEO refers to the SEO techniques and best practices you implement beyond your own website. The most essential aspect of off-page SEO is backlinks.
Backlinks, in very layman’s terms, are votes cast by other websites in favor of your platform. If several authoritative websites are linking to your site Google will consider this to be an excellent indicator.
There are several ways of obtaining backlinks.
Start out by, writing high-quality, well-researched, and unique content that other websites would organically want to link and refer to. These include informational pieces, research papers, and even well-thought-out listicles.
Another way of obtaining backlinks is by writing content for other people’s websites. This approach is called guest posting. Reach out to webmasters, offer to write for their platforms, and link your article to your site, and voila, you have a backlink.
3.) TECHNICAL-SEO
Technical SEO refers to making sure that your website’s core metrics like page load speed, load time, mobile responsiveness, etc. are up to the mark. Because if your website is not user-friendly or does not load within one to three seconds users will just hop onto other better managed platforms.
Another important aspect of technical SEO is making sure that your content pieces are being crawled and indexed by Google. This in straightforward terms means that your pages must be included in Google’s search directory so that they can reproduced against specific search queries.
WRAP UP
No business can hope to attain anything meaningful from their website without having it show up on Google’s search results pages. And the only way of getting your website the exposure it deserves is through implementing SEO.
There are three distinct types of SEO and all of them have been mentioned in the blog. Just implement each one step by step and you will start getting web traffic in almost no time.