Santa Fe SEO
The ABC's of SEOWhat is SEO and How Does it Work?
SEO is an abbreviation for Search Engine Optimization, and it describes the analytics behind the ranking of websites when a user performs a search on any one of the various search engines. SEO is the work you have to do on every page of your website in order to have Google include your site as one of the top search results whenever someone searches for a particular keyword. SEO therefore, are the steps that you must take to rank higher on Google and as a result, earn organic traffic from the various search queries people use.
In short, SEO can be defined as a marketing strategy that helps increase the quantity and quality of the visitors to your site.
There are SEO plug-ins for WordPress
That Can Help You Rank Higher
There are many free SEO plug-ins for WordPress, and these plugins do help the beginner, but they do not do all that is required.
Keeping in mind that even the professional versions of WordPress SEO plug-ins, which range in price, need serious configuration, and understanding of at least the basics of SEO. They don’t do all the work for you.
First, You Need Content
Your website content should be written for your target audience. Writing effective content that will rank on the Search Engines, interest your website visitors, and persuading that audience to do what you want them to do, requires an understanding of content marketing, user interplay, and SEO.
SEO begins with Compelling Content and the correct keywords.
If you are wanting to rank higher, then you should consider including LSI keywords and/or Semantic Keywords definition. (Latent Semantic Indexing) are keywords that are synonyms to your target terms. SEO includes both the technical and creative elements necessary to improve rankings and drive traffic to your website, from search engines.
There are many aspects to SEO, from the words on your page to the way other sites link to you on the web. Sometimes SEO is simply a matter of making sure your site is structured in a way that search engines understand.
Santa Fe SEO isn’t just about building search engine-friendly websites. It’s about making your site more effective for your visitors as well. We believe these principles go hand-in-hand.
We have the knowledge and the know-how to optimize your site for SEO — from creating the terms and phrases (keywords) that generate traffic, to developing a website that’s user friendly.
In addition, by making content available to search engines, SEO helps boost rankings so that your content will be seen prominently. The online marketplace is becoming increasingly competitive, and those companies that have invested in SEO will have a decided advantage in attracting visitors and customers.
Content Is Just The Beginning
There is no reliable way to perform SEO hastily and without planning, because each website and business will require different SEO attributes. For example, if you’re optimizing a website for local users in order to drive foot traffic to your store’s location, your SEO efforts will be different from an online eCommerce retailer. You’ll want to focus more on optimizing destination pages, increasing online citations, and creating an optimized Google My Business page.
In order to maximize visibility and increase your opportunity to rank well, it’s important to claim your local listing, otherwise known as a Google My Business page.
Now, more than ever before, people find businesses through Google search and Google Maps. They can learn a great deal from your Google My Business profile, without ever needing to visit your website and decide whether or not to do business with you.
Measuring Your Online Performance
So you have a website or a blog, maybe an e-commerce store. You’re on many of the social media platforms. Does your current host or website developer provide you with the following Analytics?
- How many people are visiting my site, store, or blog?
- Where do they live?
- Is my website mobile-friendly?
- What other sites send traffic to my website?
- What promotional campaigns drive the most traffic to my website?
- Which pages on my website are the most popular?
- How many visitors have I converted into leads or customers?
- Where did those visitors come from and what pages did they view on my website?
- How can I increase my website’s responsiveness?
- What blog posts do my visitors like the most?
Where is your website traffic coming from?
However simple or complex your online presence is, you need to know what's working and what needs to change.
We will continually monitor your sites performance and recommend changes and adjustments that will help get you the desired results.
The Top 15 Google Ranking Factors
What Does Google Look for in SEO?
Although quality and keyword-optimized content is still king when it comes to SEO, it is said that Google uses some 200 factors in its ranking algorithm.
And Google keeps changing its algorithm. Which is called “RankBrain”.
In brief, and in no particular order, the below are some of the major considerations when implementing SEO:
- Keyword targeting – A target Keyword is one word or phrase that best summarizes your page.
- Keyword in Title Tag – Write unique titles for every page. Every page on your website is unique and your title tags should reflect that
- Site and page speed – Page speed is a measurement of how fast the content on your page loads
- Backlinks – Links on websites other than your own that go back to a page on your website.
- Title and header tags – Title Tags: These are what show up in search engines. H1 Tags: This is what users will see on your webpage.
- Usability on mobile – Usability for mobile is more about how it feels and behaves than how it looks.
- Meta description – A meta description is an element that describes and summarizes the contents of your page for the benefit of users and search engines
- Length Of URL – Shorter URLs tend to rank better than long URLs
- URL structure – According to Google, A site’s URL structure should be as simple as possible
- Internal links – Internal links are links that go from one page on your website to a different page on the same website.
- Outbound Link Quality – Outbound links are one way that people and search engines discover useful content. They are important because they can improve organic traffic, and build trust.
- Image alt-text – Alt text provide better image context/descriptions to search engine crawlers, helping them to index an image properly.
- Domain Age – How long it has been since Google first indexed that domain, or saw a link to the domain.
- Content Length – Studies show that longer content dominates page one of search rankings.
- References and Sources – There are two ways of citing sources in an article: links distributed in the article body, or links listed at the end of the article.
