Optimizing SEO

Optimizing SEO 

In this lesson, you’re expected to:
– understand the importance of your website and other owned media
– learn about the key elements that need to be optimized
– discover the need for responsive design

Importance of your Website

Your website is the foundation of your digital marketing. It’s the piece of real estate your business owns on the internet, where you can tell people about your product, publish original content that helps them overcome their challenges.

But building an attractive website isn’t enough. You need to make sure you optimize it so that it generates a constant flow of visitors, leads and customers.

More and more people use search engines to find information — it’s the first point of call when you have a question or you’re looking for information about something.

So, it’s important for your website to be displayed in search results so that when people are searching for something related to your company, they can click through to your website and find the information they’re looking for.

SEO is the key to getting your website discovered via search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo. The traditional approach to SEO involves two sets of tactics:

1) On-page SEO 
2) Off-page SEO

1) On-Page SEO 

At a basic level, on-page SEO is the strategic implementation of keywords on your website, including in page titles, headers, meta descriptions, and other elements you can see.

However it can become much more technical, looking into improve your site structure, page load speed, and the rate at which Google is able to index your website.

2) Off-Page SEO 

Off-page SEO refers to improving your website’s overall authority, which is largely determined by what other websites are linking to you.

The goal is to attract inbound links (also known as “backlinks”) from relevant, authoritative websites.

SEO in Today’s World

In the past, the goal of SEO was to impress the search engines so that they’d give you higher rankings by gaining backlinks and adding as many keywords on a page as possible — with the ultimate goal being to achieve the coveted #1 spot in the search results for one of your target keywords.

Today, search engines are smarter. They can tell the difference between spammy websites and legitimate websites that are providing relevant high-quality content.

Modern SEO is about optimizing for the searchers, not just the search engines. 

4) Images

Images on a web page can enhance user experience. When inserting images into your website, however, you should keep in mind the following:

Don’t use images excessively
More pictures can slow down the loading of your page, thus negatively impacting both user experience and SEO — search engines take page loading time into account in their ranking algorithms.

Customize the “alt text” of an image
For various reasons, the images on your site may fail to render. To ensure that visitors can still understand the information you’re presenting in the image, customize the “alt text” attribute of an image to describe the image.

This will also help search engines understand that your image is relevant to the page, which is factored into search algorithms and will help you draw in relevant traffic from image searches.

5) URL Structure

The URL of a web page is its web address.

For example, the URL of MyLeanMBA’s blog is: http://blog.myleanmba.com/.

URL structure refers to how the text in a URL is organized, as well as how the different URLs on your website interact with one another.

When structuring your website’s URLs, there are a few best practices to keep in mind: 

Separate keywords with hyphens
For your internal page URLs, separate individual keywords with hyphens (-).

Describe what’s on the page
Structure your URLs so that searchers can easily understand what information they’re going to find. For example, if you land on a company’s products page, seeing the URL http://company.com/products/product-name will be much more reassuring than something like http://company.com/1543?/eh?.

Use 301 redirects when necessary 
A 301 redirect forwards an old URL to a new one. Make sure you do this if you change the URL of a page on your site. A common mistake is not applying a 301 redirect between yoursite.com and www.yoursite.com.

Benefits of SEO 

1) Natural listings are perceived as non-biased and thus have more credibility.

2) Link Building & Content Development are two initiatives that can have positive effects that last over time.

3) 60-90% of traffic on a website comes from SEO.

4) There is no cost per click as there is with PPC.

5) SEO gives better ROI than any other marketing channel.

6) SEO is useful at all stages of the purchase funnel.

What is Link Building?

Link building is the process of acquiring hyperlinks from other websites to your own. A link is a way for users to navigate between pages on the internet.

Search engines use links to crawl the web; they will crawl the links between the individual pages on your website, and they will crawl the links between entire websites.

Importance of Link Building

Links are the currency of the web. They’re so important that Google uses them to gauge the usefulness of a particular page and where it should rank in their search engine results pages (SERPs).

However, not all links are the same. Some links will increase your traffic, while others can actually reduce it.

The truth is that five quality links from authority sites will weigh more heavily in your favor than ten mediocre links from generic sites. That’s because the anchor text and external link to a particular web page is part of Google’s ranking algorithm.