You've probably heard that SEO is an important asset in some way or another. But why is it important? What goes into it? Why do we keep hearing the terms 'keywords' and 'backlinks' and why are they so valuable? Today we'll be going over a quick overview of what SEO and link building are, why you need to be implementing them, and how to do it the right way. What Is SEO and Why Do You Need It?
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving a website's visibility in organic (unpaid) search engine results. This involves optimizing your site so that search engines like Google, can easily understand, index, and rank your site's content to show up higher in search engine results. This is an extremely helpful process because SEO can help drive targeted traffic to your website by making it more accessible and relevant to search engine users. If your site appears higher in search engine results, this will increase your traffic and click-through rates (CTR). This is a free way to build the visibility of your site (and ultimately trust), which increases your site's chances of gaining more conversions.
How To Implement SEO:
There are many different approaches to maximizing your SEO process. These can be broken down into the 'Three Pillars of SEO':
-Technical Optimization: Completing activities on your site that are designed to improve SEO but aren't related to the site's content. (Ex: submitting your sitemap to Google, crawl accessibility, great user experience, snippet/schema markup).
-On-page Optimization: Ensuring the content on your site is relevant and provides a good user experience. (Ex: compelling content that answers the searcher’s query, keyword optimization, title, URL & description for high CTRs, internal linking).
-Off-page Optimizations: Enhancing the site's search engine rankings through activities outside of the site. (Ex: high-quality backlinks, citations, social media sharing).
What Is Link Building and How Does It Tie Into SEO?
Link building is the process of acquiring hyperlinks (backlinks) from other websites to your own. This is an important step in improving your SEO and driving organic traffic. It increases your website's credibility and trust, which ultimately leads to the likelihood of a higher ranking in search engine results. Essentially, search engines have many different ways in which they decide which order websites will appear when a search query is made. One of those ways is through relevant keywords. When the search engine is deciding what is the most relevant, they don't just look at the content of the site's page, but also at how many links are pointing to that page from external websites (in addition to the quality of those external websites in of itself). If a lot of high-quality websites are linking to your site, this makes it more likely to rank well when it comes time to be shown in a search result. It's essentially like collecting a vote of confidence that people trust your site. Not only does this improve your SEO, but it also enhances your referral links from people organically clicking through to your site from other relevant sites due to genuine interest.
How Do You Build Links?
-Earn Links: Other sites decide to link to your site without you asking them to. You can increase your chance of naturally being linked by having quality content that has a lot of visual assets, online tools, guides & tutorials, etc.
-Ask For Links: Directly contact websites to request they link to your site. They can choose whether or not to do this based on whether your content is relevant to their readers or if they want to credit you for contributing something to their site. At the heart of asking for links, lies building relationships. Growing the necessary connections with people/businesses/writers in your industry can help improve your chances of gaining links when you ask, or naturally earning them because they respect and trust you and vice versa.
-Add Links: Adding your links to other sites yourself isn't that effective for SEO since search engines often treat these as low-quality. However, you can still add them to social media, directories, blog comments, etc, which can direct people to your site organically. Buying links is also not recommended. Most search engines have spam guidelines and flag/ignore these, potentially harming your site's ranking.
Will SEO Stay Relevant Forever?As of right now, SEO isn't going anywhere. However, in a time when the internet is constantly evolving, how does SEO change with it? I was browsing LinkedIn for how digital marketers are reacting to this shift, and found an interesting article from Muhammad Nouman Khan, CEO of GuestPostingSolution. Recently, we've seen a shift toward AI-generated content/search engines, which has changed the way we think about SEO. Digital marketers are having to move beyond just keyword optimization, toward conversational and intent-based strategies. Tools like ChatGPT and Google's AI-generated search results, have altered how users are getting information, often receiving AI-generated content before typical web results. There's now this task of creating content valuable enough to be referenced by AI search engines itself, as Google says it still favors human-first content, it just displays it in a different way than we're used to.
SEO and link building aren't just buzzwords, they're important tools for building visibility, trust, and long-term growth for your website. SEO isn't going anywhere, so it's better to learn it now and stay ahead of the curve.
