If you work at a company that has any form of online presence, you have probably attended at least one meeting concerning SEO.
Search engine optimization or SEO is the process of affecting the visibility of a website or a web page in a web search engine’s unpaid results – often referred to as “natural”, “organic”, or “earned” results. It refers to techniques that help your website rank higher in search engine result pages (SERPs). This makes your website stand out to people looking for information related to your brand, product, or service.
SEO works by optimizing a website’s pages, conducting keyword research, and earning inbound links. You can usually see results of SEO efforts once your website or page has been crawled and indexed by a search engine.
Search engines look for elements including title tags, keywords, image tags, internal link structure, and inbound links (also known as backlinks). Search engines also look at site structure and design, visitor behavior and other off-site factors to determine your site’s ranking.
Search engines work through three primary functions:
Crawling: Combing through the internet for relevant content, sorting the code/content for each URL they find.
Indexing: Storing and organizing the content found during the crawling process. Once a page has been indexed, it is now in the running to be displayed as a top result to relevant searches.
Ranking: Search results that are ordered by most relevant to least relevant.
You can’t simply include as many keywords as possible on your site to reach people searching for you. This actually will actively hurt your site’s SEO because search engines have learned to recognize keyword stuffing, or the act of including keywords to specifically rank that keyword higher in search results.
The objective is to be smart and use your keywords in a way that is natural to the content. Whenever you create content, your focus should be on the needs of your audience, not how many people you can pull in based on keywords. Before you create a new site page or blog post, consider what keywords you want to incorporate into your content that will effectively reach the audience you want to reach.
The goal of SEO is to be the first thing the user finds. But how do we do that? The world wide web is a competitive place. You can be competing against thousands of other sites offering similar content. Any time a person performs a search, they receive thousands (even millions!) of possible results. So how do search engines determine what pages are most valuable to their searchers? A large part of determining where your page will rank is how well the content on your page matches a search’s intent. Basically, does the page match the words that were searched and help complete the task the searcher was trying to accomplish?
The goal of optimizing SEO keywords is to be higher for certain terms. Single words may be too competitive and broad to effectively use; when you search “recipes” thousands of results show up. The single word is too broad, so you have to determine who you are trying to reach with your content. Carve a niche for yourself! Even though New York Times Cooking and Bon Appetit are some of the biggest, most well-known cooking and recipe publications, they often aren’t the first results when you search for recipes. The vast subject of recipes allows other blogs to focus based on keywords and specific recipe searches.
When searching for a broad term like “recipes”, aggregate sites are usually the top result because of their constant updating.
A good way to find what keywords to focus on is to utilize search engines’ suggested searches for “long tail keywords”. Long tail keywords are usually search phrases that are 4+ words. They’re more specific and cut down on the competition. Consistently updating content also increases your chances of your content being the first result in a search engine.
NYT Cooking stays on top of search results by not only constantly updating and refreshing their content but also making their keywords more targeted and specific.
Search engine optimization is something that benefits web pages big and small. It has shaped how we use the web today and ensures that bigger pages can’t just pay their way into being the most popular search result.
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