What is SEO (Search Engine Optimization)? | Vicinus.ai

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is the backbone of increasing traffic to your website. Most marketers know about SEO, however, if you’re just setting out on your marketing journey, below is a beginner’s guide to SEO.

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What is SEO?

SEO simply means Search Engine Optimisation. Through organic search practices, SEO increases both the quality and quantity of traffic to your website.

Local SEO graphic with computer surrounded by data analytics icons and symbols

What Do I Need To Optimise SEO (Search Engine Optimization)?

There are a few important parts to SEO. Below is a list of a few of the most important parts that go into SEO:

Quality of Traffic to your Website: This is simple, but really important when coming up with an SEO strategy. If you’re getting traffic to your website, but they are uninterested in your business’s products and/or service, they are not quality traffic. Your business needs to be attracting visitors who are interested in buying the products and/or services you’re offering.
Quantity of Traffic to your Website: Afte you have to ensure that the traffic coming to your website is quality, increasing the quantity of this quality leads is imperative. The more the better!
Organic Results and Organic Traffic: Utilising organic optimization saves money on creating traffic and ads make up for a significant portion of SERP’s (search engine result pages) too.

Tip: Find a journalism or English major in college to go through your website and provide a critique. Getting a fresh perspective from someone with a strong writing skill set can provide you with a lot of insight. Source: Entrepreneur, 2017

Google Search Laptop Graphic to represent Google SEO ranking factors.

How Does SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Work?

SEO works to make sure that your website is found when a user types in a specific keyword, or list of keywords, in the search results. For example, when the keywords ‘coffee shop near me’ is used, having a good SEO plan for your website will ensure that yours is one of the first search results. However, the question is, how does this happen? Simply having a website online doesn’t ensure that it gets found by potential customers. Google utilises crawlers to gather information from your website using all the content that you have added. These crawlers bring back 1s and 0s and build an index from this. This index then is fed via Google’s algorithm and matches all this data with the queries of the searchers using the search engine.

What Are Some Factors Used To Rank on Google?

There are many factors that help rank your page on Google, such as:

Social metrics (these are your social platforms)
Traffic/user usage (this includes CTR, quantity, clickstream etc.)
Keyword usage (these include exact and partial matches)
Load speed
Links to websites
& more

There are quite a few ways to optimise this list above, including, but certainly not limited to, title tags, meta descriptions, internal links, length of content, and more.

How Can I Learn SEO (Search Engine Optimization)?

Below are a few of the fundamentals of SEO that you must learn before moving onto more complicated SEO techniques.

Build an SEO-friendly website

The first thing you must do is ensure your website is SEO friendly. This can be from utilizing your domain name to be SEO friendly (using keywords is a great idea) as well as using internal links to your website not only from external sources but from your own website too.

Content and related markup

You need content on your website for it to be useful for a customer. You must ensure that the content you’re putting out on your website is SEO-friendly as well as focusing on specific keywords too. Entrepreneur suggests that:

‘Google wants to see that you have a legitimate site with legitimate traffic. This means your content needs to be stellar. Your blog content on your own site should have compelling topics. You should be actively promoting your blogs on Facebook to drive traffic to your blog. Your homepage and interior pages should provide insightful information that will provide value for the reader. Your site NEEDS to be mobile-friendly.’

Topics for Website Content

Guest blogging and using Nofollow links are great for SEO (although these have to be used appropriately). Link-building should be a priority as it not only increases the authority of your website but also increases the ranking too. For more information about the fundamentals of SEO with Google, check out this course to gain more knowledge of the basics.

What is SEO (Search Engine Optimization)?