Everybody knows they need it, but most of us are confused about it.
Here are some things you did not know about SEO.
It is like the term ‘marketing’. Everybody is familiar with the term and knows they need it for digital marketing to run their business. The trouble is that hardly any business owner knows precisely what to do with either.
Both marketing and SEO are vast fields with several sub-areas within.
Business owners know they need these and might think they are actually doing them in practice. Which is probably not true. This post is intended to help clarify the meaning of search engine optimisation in the simplest way possible.
Search Engine Optimisation, or SEO in short, consists of three separate areas:
- On-page-,
- Off-page-, and
- Technical SEO.
All traffic you can drive to your website is either Organic or Paid. When you are optimising for search engines you are working on driving more organic traffic to your website.
What is the difference between On-page SEO, Off-page SEO, and Technical SEO?
I have created a short list in which I will explain.
On-page S.E.O.
This aspect is concerned primarily with the content on the site and how well it is optimised for relevant keywords. Also, how it provides a good user experience for the site visitors.
In a nutshell:
It is about page and content optimisation and UX.
In bullet points:
- Site content
- Title tag
- Meta tag
- H1-H3 optimisation
- Internal linking
- Content relevance
- Conversion optimisation
- Image optimisation.
Off-page S.E.O.
This aspect is concerned primarily with inbound links from other websites to your site. Natural links from authoritative, relevant websites act as an independent vote of confidence which helps search engines trust your website more.
In a nutshell:
It is about website promotion.
In bullet points:
- Link building
- Content marketing
- Social media
- Podcasts
- Reviews
Technical S.E.O.
This aspect focuses on how well search engine spiders can crawl your site and index your content.
In a nutshell:
It is about website crawling and indexing.
In bullet points:
- Page speed
- Structured data – Schema
- Site structure
- Canonicalisation
- XML sitemaps
- Hreflang
- URL formatting
- Redirections
Next time when your marketer talks to you about SEO or when anyone is pitching you about doing search engine optimisation for your business online, remember this post.
SEO is not one thing but three separate areas.
When these are done together strategically, they can do miracles for a business.
Please also note! Search engine optimisation can take a very long time and could mean a considerable amount of investment for a business.
You do not necessarily need all the above search engine optimisations. You may choose only specific areas to improve your SEO. My field is on-site-, and technical SEO. If you need help with either of these, contact me!
Thank you for reading my post.
I am Shopi.
I help businesses build solid online foundations.
