SEO 101: What You Need to Know to Get Started

By Jenny Traster

Any good inbound marketing strategy has several aspects that can never be ignored, and one of them is SEO. SEO isn't a one-time deal either. It's an ongoing practice, or at least it should be, if you want all your hard work and efforts to result in ongoing success.

What It Is

SEO stands for search engine optimization, and it refers to methods used to ensure your website and its content show up on search engine results pages (SERPs). Google is by far the most popular search engine, which makes it the typical focus when most marketers are in the process of optimizing. While the concept of SEO is fairly straightforward, its implementation can get rather complicated.

Why You Need It

Complicated or not, SEO is something even the smallest companies need to at least think about. Search engines are the greatest generator of website traffic, with a Conductor study noting that 64 percent of all web traffic comes from organic searches.

The percentage is significant, especially when compared to the 2 percent of traffic that comes from social media, the 6 percent that comes from paid searches, the 12 percent from directly typing in the URL, and the 15 percent from referrals.

If your company is missing the mark with SEO, you're likewise missing out on a massive amount of traffic that would be led to your site after typing in a relevant search term.

How to Make It Work

Keywords are an important part of SEO, but they aren't necessarily king. The rest of your SEO practices need to back up your keywords to prove your content is relevant and useful to people searching for information on related topics.

Keywords

Research keywords related to your products and services, as well as those used by your competitors. Use keywords in the most important parts of your web pages, such as your page title, meta description, header tags, URL, and text that links to other pages throughout your site.

Content

The type of content you produce plays a major role in your SEO. Content on your website, social media channels and elsewhere needs to be relevant and provide value to the consumer. Valuable content is well-produced, helpful, useful, and something people actually want to read or view.

Creating content with a human audience in mind, rather than writing for a search engine, is going to win out every time. Consider publishing a regular lineup of evergreen content, or more thoughtful, insightful content that remains relevant and useful for the long haul.

Other pieces of content to pay attention to include: