How to Market Online with Search Engine Optimization, SEO

Search Engine Optimization, SEO, is the key to helping your target market find you online. It is what helps search engines to rank your website in their SERPs. Irrespective of whatsoever you are marketing online, be it a tangible good/product or even if you are offering a service, you need a good SEO to get noticed online. SEO simply involves a complex set of algorithms created by various search engines to determine the rank of links that address a user’s query. That is what enables search engines to make the highest quality links appear highest in search results. By doing so, these links get noticed by searchers first and they tend to click on them first in order of priority. That simply translates to higher organic traffic through such high ranked links.

 

Every search engine may have its own proprietary algorithm but most tend to follow the one developed by Google since Google appears to be the largest search engine at the moment judging from the high percentage of searches attributable to it. Even though the exact components of the Google algorithm and the weighting factors assigned to each component may not be very well known to marketers, SEO experts spend a lot of time and effort conducting experiments to try to determine what these factors are and how they affect the weightings/rankings. What is well known is that links showing up on the first page of the search results on SERPs tend to garner most of the clicks especially those among the top three results. That really counts for something in SEO marketing. Web searchers click on these links first and the beneficiary websites get more organic traffic. Marketers must therefore place more emphasis on SEO with a very keen eye on what SEO experts believe are some of the most impactful factors/activities that determine website ranking. These are:

1. Website security through HTTPS protocols.

2. Gaining backlinks and linking to authoritative online sources, which act as a validation of your content.

3. Mobile-friendliness.

4. Site speed.

5. Providing a positive user experience.

6. Domain age.

7. Social signals, such as clicks from social and other forms of engagement.

8. Producing valuable content on a consistent basis for your website.

Besides these, there are other technical activities which play a role in getting found online. These activities have to do with the choice of and use of specific keywords throughout your website. A key SEO requirement is that the keywords you choose to represent your content must also match closely with user intent as reflected by the words used and the query. These are huge technical matters which may best be handled by SEO experts.

Because of the huge technical challenges in SEO, most business owners/marketers do hire the services of SEO experts to help them out. If however as a business owner you have the education, experience, the right SEO software and the knowhow to do it yourself, all well and good. This option may be less expensive and more effective to meet your business needs. If you do not know how to handle SEO for your website, you are best advised to approach professional agencies or individual SEO experts to help handle it for you. A good SEO on your website is very important and may even be indispensable to the success of your overall online marketing strategy.