Beginner's Guide to SEO: What the Heck is It and How Do You Do It?

What’s the Point of SEO?

The point of SEO is to bring more traffic to your website. In short, it’s a marketing strategy that helps boost your sales by bringing more visitors to your site. The best way to think about SEO is that it’s like getting a lot of sales from a very large billboard. You don’t see that billboard every day, and it costs money to keep the billboard up. But it will bring you a lot of business over the years if it’s placed in the right spot with the right message. SEO is the same idea. You don’t see it every day, but it will bring you a lot of business over the years if you do it right. SEO is used to drive more organic traffic to your website by increasing your website’s search engine ranking.

How Does SEO Work?

When you type a search query into Google or any other search engine, the search engine will show you a list of search results. This list is known as an organic result. The search engine ranks your website by looking at over 200 different “on-site” and “off-site” factors. “On-site” factors are factors that have to do with your website’s content and internal linking structure; whereas, “off-site” factors are factors that have everything to do with external linking structure, authority, and reputation (e.g. links from other high-authority websites, etc.). SEO is the process of improving the visibility of a website so that its rank increases in the search engine result pages (SERPs) for relevant keywords. SEO can be broken down into two parts.

How to Do SEO Right Now

There are 3 things you can do right now that will help boost your SEO: improve your on-site factors, build external links, and build internal links. Let’s get into each one: On-Site Factors: Internal Links - The best way to start improving your on-site factors would be to create more internal links within the content of your website. Internal links are links that lead your reader from one page of your website to another page of your website. Think of it like a hub and spokes model. External Links - The next best way to start improving your on-site factors is to build external links to your website. There are many different ways to go about this. You can ask someone who has a website to link to your website. Content - The final way to start improving your on-site factors is to create more content for your website. This doesn’t just mean creating more pages. You can start creating useful blog posts that answer your reader’s questions and provide value.

The Biggest Misconception About SEO

The biggest misconception about SEO is that you need thousands of backlinks to rank high in the search engines. You don’t. In fact, if you try to go that route, you’re probably going to get slapped by Google. The most important thing is to focus on creating high-quality content for your readers. If your content is helpful, useful, and something that people want to share, you’ll get backlinks naturally. Another misconception is that you need to do SEO for a year before you see any results. It actually depends on your niche. If you have a very competitive industry, then it may take longer. But if you have a less competitive industry, you might start seeing some results within a few months.

The Bottom Line

The bottom line is that SEO is like a billboard. While you don’t see it every day and it costs money to keep it up, it will bring you a lot of business over the years if you place it in the right spot with the right message. SEO is the same idea. It doesn’t happen overnight, and it’s not something that you can do for a day or two and then forget about it. It’s a long-term strategy that you need to continue to do every single day with the goal of bringing more traffic to your website.