When managing an online presence of any kind for any sort of work, you’re going to run into the concept of SEO. It’s a term people band around quite often, but that doesn’t mean it’s simple to understand. SEO, or search engine optimization, is a highly informed series of techniques that are ever-evolving to keep up with the constant algorithm renovations that take place across platforms.

The following will explore how search engine optimization can be understood at the moment and will point out some of the things you can do to improve your rankings, no matter if you’re just starting out or have been blogging for years. Of course, search engines are always altering how they rank and position sites, so understand that SEO is a constant, long-term practice. You can’t tackle it once and then let it sit and expect your site to continue to perform well. It’s a never-ending process of learning and readjusting to reflect the new information learned.

What Is Search Engine Optimization?

SEO is a process by which you communicate to various search engines like DuckDuckGo, Google, Yahoo, and Bing that your webpage is useful to other people and, therefore, should be shown to people searching for specific topics. Every search engine uses a slightly different method for calculating how valuable your site is to viewers, but a few more prominent themes are present across the board.

Keywords

One of the first things you need to do when looking to boost your SEO is to identify and study your keywords. These are the words that people who will find your content useful, interesting, or entertaining will be typing into search engines. Let’s say you have a website devoted to healthy recipes for people with peanut allergies—your keywords might be: healthy recipes, peanut-free recipes, etc. Part of choosing keywords to focus on involves figuring out how often terms are searched using a keyword calculator and figuring out what long-tail keywords and questions people use when searching with them. It also means understanding how competitive keywords are. Just because millions of people are searching for a term doesn’t mean that you should start working it into your content. You’re trying to find keywords with a small number of results found for a relatively large amount of searches.

For many people, studying the usage of keywords via search engine data can be confusing and overwhelming. Many who seek out professional help with SEO cite this as one of their primary reasons. Professional internet marketing teams have access to tools that allow them to compare keywords and the demographics of people searching for them. They’ll be able to suggest new keywords for you to create content around. With our earlier example, this might mean that they discover people are searching for the best peanut-free chocolate cake recipes, and they might suggest you find a way to present your version of chocolate cake.

Backlinks

Another significant component of your search engine ranking is how powerful your backlinks are. Backlinking occurs when another site (with a high domain authority) links to one of your pages. Domain authority is what search engines use to consider how trustworthy a site is. Domain authority is built over time, but also by the quality of links to and from the site. Therefore, a large part of SEO strategy includes guest posting, guest podcasting, and interviews on other sites that have a link back to your page. This helps boost your legitimacy in the eyes of a search engine.

Friendly To All

Another element of SEO increasing in recent months is making sure that your content is accessible to all. This means having transcriptions of podcasts, alternative text descriptions for images, and subtitles for videos. Ensure that whatever way someone wants to ingest your content, they can, and your position in the eyes of search engines will be improved. This includes making sure your site, and all your content are mobile device-friendly. It turns out that for years, more searches have been conducted on mobile devices than traditional computers. You might need to go over your website design with mobile in mind and pay attention to your load speeds. Mobile users click away really quickly if a page doesn’t load.

With the above concepts in mind, you’re well on your way to understanding search engine optimization. Again, SEO isn’t a singular task, it’s a process, and it takes consistent effort to achieve results. More than this, when researching SEO online, always make sure to check the date an article was published. If it’s more than a few years old, there’s a good chance that it is no longer as relevant as it once was. Search engines change their algorithms sometimes as much as every few months.

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