The Web Squad

Welcome to Your SEO Crash Course!

If you’re looking to learn more about how to use your website to make a name for your company, you’ve come to the right place! You can consider the Web Squad your all-inclusive digital marketing counselors.

Before you work on getting your website on the right track, it’s important that you understand one of the most important underlying principles of digital marketing: search engine optimization, or SEO. This term refers to way that search engines use certain programs and algorithms to determine which websites on the Internet are more relevant to a user’s input into a search engine. That’s right: your website can be specially tailored to catch search engines’ attention and get your website as high up on the list as possible, it just takes some practice to get your SEO skills just right.

It used to be that the use of websites and Internet resources could help companies to establish their reputation and stand out from the crowd. However, times have changed as technology has become more advanced. Having a comprehensive, easy-to-navigate, and organized website is only the bare minimum that a company can do to establish a good online reputation and be taken seriously by potential clients. There’s no doubt that having an old, disorganized, outdated website will prompt your viewers to take their business elsewhere.

Did you know that the first 5 results in a Google results page gets two-thirds of all the clicks? You might have had some idea of this before, but the truth is that if your link is displayed lower down than the top half of the page, your website will suffer. If you hope to direct traffic towards your website, it’s important that you pay careful attention to the content of your website. Not only should your website contain relevant information that will keep your user interested in the moment and ready to come back for more in the future, but it should be organized in a way that makes it more attractive to searchers who have never visited your website before.

This is why your SEO techniques are such useful skills to hone. If you’re able to carefully skew your website’s content, you can easily make it become more detectable by search engine’s algorithms. SEO is an umbrella term that takes into account all of the bots, algorithms, and other programs that are utilized by search engines to look for websites to list on the results page. Using SEO tactics can help your website make its way to the top of the list. If you don’t practice good SEO, the chances of your business’ website garnering much recognition are pretty low. Think about it: how many people do you know click to the second or third page on a Google search results page? Almost nobody, right?

Maximizing your SEO skills is critical if you hope to make your website successful. For instance, it’s not very well-known, but typing in a word, phrase, or sentence in a search engine does not simply peruse the full extent of the depths of the Internet. In fact, all you are doing is looking through that search engine’s index of the Internet, which is almost never complete. Search engines use several programs and algorithms to collect links. One type of these programs is called a spider, which “crawls” from one page to another using links that connect them and store the information back to the home page. These spiders will inform search engines whether or not your website is a relevant response to certain keywords, which is why it’s important to have a strong, stable “web” that connects the pages within your website.

It’s not always public information exactly how different search engines decide whether some websites should rank higher than others, but there are plenty of good guesses out there. To help organize these, there are two common types of SEO that web developers utilize. On-page SEO refers to the most superficial of optimization factors, such as article titles, headings and subheadings, page structure, format, and more. Off-page SEO takes other factors into consideration that are not directly related to the way you’ve structured the website. Some examples of off-page SEO include social networks or links that connect different websites, browsing history and circumstances of each individual searcher, and the popularity of other websites in your same field.

When it comes to fully maximizing your on-page SEO, arguably the most important factor is to produce quality content and then format it in a way that includes important keywords without boring the users. Now, developing high-quality content is not easy and takes a lot of time and practice, especially when incorporating important keywords. Once you get the hang of it, however, you can begin to focus on HTML to make sure you have a very user-friendly, easy-to-navigate, organized, and fast-loading website.

Now, off-page SEO is slightly less in your control, having to do with circumstances such as the background and natural dialect of your viewers. One thing that off-page SEO focuses on is the so-called trustworthiness of your website, which involves establishing a solid reputation. Some ways to boost the reliability of your website involve naming it something cohesive and authoritative, especially including a .edu or .gov ending instead of .com. Think about it: how many scam websites have you seen with generic names that never seem to last for more than a few days at a time? Additionally, off-page SEO takes into consideration something called your “bounce rate.” Bounce rate refers to the amount of people who exit your website after only looking at the homepage instead of sticking around to explore. Luckily, your bounce rate will be quite low if you produce good content and organize it well!

It seems like there is a lot to keep in mind here, right? It’s true – SEO is an ever-evolving field, which mirrors the development of technology. That’s why the Web Squad is here to help. We’ll take care of SEO for you so you don’t have to worry so much about the details.