What is SEO?

If you have a website, you might have heard the term SEO, or maybe not. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. In easy terms, that means optimizing your websites for search engines. That translates into people finding your website and, in turn, your product or services. So, if you have a website, particularly one that earns you income, you need SEO because you want to make sure anyone searching for a website like yours can find it.

To better understand what SEO is, we need to talk about the different aspects of SEO, what they entail, and why they’re essential. Here, we’ll cover On-Page, Off-Page, Local, and Technical SEO and how each can help improve searchability.

What is On-Page SEO

On-Page SEO is the easiest part of SEO. It’s the part that everyday visitors can see on your site. On-Page SEO makes for enjoyable user outcomes, meaning returning visitors.

This type of SEO covers various things, such as H1s (page titles), image size, text size, organization, and content viewers are ACTUALLY looking for. It also includes having relevant external and internal links, which shows both people and search engines that you’ve done your research and created relevant content for your site.

This portion of SEO is vital because, without it, search engines see the website as hard to read, unorganized, and irrelevant. If search engines see your site as not worth looking at, they won’t rank your website very high.

But what does that mean? Let’s pretend that you sell cooking spices. Well, there are a lot of websites out there selling cooking spices. Your website is competing against all those other sites. So, how do we make sure your site shows up in search engines when someone searches for “cooking spices?” If you want to be competitive, you need to have a better website and better content; that’s where on-page SEO comes in.

What is Off-Page SEO

Off-Page SEO refers to what’s going on outside of the website—for instance, getting other websites to point to your site or blog post. Unfortunately, this is the most time-consuming, least exciting, hardest, but the best way of getting authority for your site. It’s called backlinking.

Why is backlinking so good? Well, backlinking shows search engines, such as Google, that your content is so good that it deserves attention. And if your site deserves attention, then it must have a good reputation. Sites with good reputations get higher authority, which means you’ll be rewarded with more visitors to your website.

This is important because it can be the difference between your website being on page 3 and page 1 of search engines. And considering that most people don’t do a lot of digging, and go to the first relevant site that pops up, if you’re on page 2 or 3 of Google, they probably won’t find your site.

Disclaimer: Many companies practice Black Hat SEO here. This usually means the SEO Specialist is paying for links or spamming a bunch of sites with a link to your site. This is a quick way to get authority. Unfortunately, you’ll eventually be penalized for this practice, and it’ll be like trying to find a needle in a haystack the size of Texas to find your site using a search engine.

What is Local SEO?

Local SEO is kind of what it sounds like, SEO tailored explicitly toward a local crowd. For instance, let’s say you own a bakery in a small town of Virginia that makes most or all of its income on local, in-person customers. With that in mind, you want to make sure those coming to your website are capable of coming to your physical store. This means you don’t need to advertise to people on the West Coast. Otherwise, you’re spending money and time getting viewsfrom people who won’t spend any money at your local bakery in Virginia.

This form of SEO works on creating and optimizing quality Google My Business accounts, writing up the schema for the backend of your website (what site visitors don’t see), and creating quality maps for your site, and creating citations. A combination of these things are good practices for local SEO.

Local SEO is important for shops that operate out of a storefront, and it’s important because when someone is searching for “bakery near me,” you want to make sure your bakery actually shows up.

What is Technical SEO?

Technical SEO is probably the least known part of SEO, and it’s also one of the more difficult parts for those who might want to try and do SEO on their own. While it’s not impossible, it is time-consuming.

This form of SEO focuses on the parts of SEO your users don’t see. It’s the stuff on the backend of your site. Technical SEO does things such as look at page errors (404s, for example), blocked pages, broken links, and broken images. It ensures things such as proper meta tags, alt text, indexing, sitemaps, and schema are entered into your site.

Technical SEO is paramount to a website because it makes sure search engines understand what your site’s about. It’s also needed for user experience. If you have a ton of broken links and page errors, people aren’t going to stay on your website, and chances are they won’t come back. This all translates into a search engine not comprehending your site, therefore not referencing your site when an individual is looking for exactly what your site advertises. And, if they happen to get it right, it means that people are likely to click on the site and quickly leave because they don’t like the experience. This, in turn, tells a search engine that you have a terrible site, and they’ll slowly stop recommending your site to people.

SEO and Right Visual Inc.

Here at Right Visual Inc., we believe in ethical, White Hat SEO practices. We’ll never do anything shady, eventually harming your website. We’ll also make sure you actually know what it is we’re doing and why we’re doing it, so you’re never left in the dark.

Right Visual Inc. offers various SEO services, from content-based SEO to Google My Business management and optimization. So, before you look anywhere else for your SEO needs, look to a company that will always do right by the customer, Right Visual Inc.