A Beginner’s Guide to SEO

SEO is one of those terms that gets thrown around, but what exactly is it? How does it fit into the integrated marketing mix? 

What is SEO? 

SEO stands for search engine optimization, and as Wikipedia defines it: “the process of improving the quality and quantity of website traffic to a website or a web page from search engines.” In more understandable terms, SEO is the process of making a website better for search engines, like Google.  It makes websites show up higher in consumer searches to drive more traffic to those sites.

How do you do it?

There are four effective ways to ensure success when looking to optimize your website in search engines and to utilize SEO at its best to bring your website to the top.

The first step is to research. The classic advertising go to—but that is exactly what is important here too. Finding what people search for is a big component of SEO, because then you can add those keywords into coding on your website. 

The next step regards content creation. Of course, your content must engage your target audience and make them do something, like enter a contest or download a form. Whatever it ends up being, it’s all about converting visitors, so making content that will do that is key.

The next essential aspect of SEO is making content as clear as it can be. While using enormous words can make your content seem super intelligent and ultra correct, then users would have to search for a more specific term—like enormous instead of just big.

Another way to draw SEO is through link building. The authority of a link raises PageRank and brings your sites to the tops of search engines.

Chloe Patel