Beginner’s Guide to SEO

Ongoing SEO success can be an elusive goal for many companies and marketing teams. The challenges that SEO presents can be many: from knowing how to properly optimize content, to developing that content in the first place, to attracting quality links, to having the right keywords in the right places. Knowing if you’re doing SEO right can be puzzling and may lead you and your company to consider giving up SEO all together – or not starting it in the first place.

If that’s where you’re finding yourself today, allow me to present a few thoughts for your consideration when you ask the question, “What does SEO do for us anyway? Is it worth it?” Here’s a quick beginner’s guide to SEO. Use it to build your knowledge in and on this oh-so-important marketing tool. 

Beginner’s Guide to SEO: What does SEO do for your website?

1. Placement and Ranking

Probably the most obvious and pursed reason for engaging in SEO is to become more visible as a website, and more available to your customers. As long as you’re producing valuable content and information for your users – you’re going to need to engage search engines to make sure that valuable content is being found by your users. Proper SEO helps your users find your content exactly when they need it and when they’re searching for it.

2. Great Content

A positive side effect of current SEO tactics is that your content will improve. As search engines become more sophisticated, they are able to recognize content that is user friendly, readable, navigable, and valuable as a resource. Search engines place higher ranks on this content and these pages. This fact should and will cause you and your team to want to re-write or perhaps reshape existing content to be more search engine friendly (AKA, user-friendly). It should also inspire a new process for producing regular, valuable content additions to your website which are written for users first, but also optimized properly for search engines. If you’re looking for some help in this area, check out this great link to understand how to plan and write content that is optimized for search engines.

3. Attracts Links

Google has commented on a decreased importance of links, but that doesn’t mean they’re irrelevant by any means. Rather, they are a useful and positive indicator of successful content on your website. Links are still a very valuable way for search engines to find your website. Assuming your team is producing good content on a regular basis which your visitors find useful, your links will increase and search engines will find your website to be an ever-growing, authoritative and valuable resource on the topic at hand.

4. Creates a Valuable Resource

Again, another very positive effect of practicing good SEO is that it focuses your team and your company to produce good content – that good content builds up over time and produces a very valuable, informative, and thorough resource to anyone interested on the topic or industry you cover. It is important to maximize your user’s experience as they scour your website. Your navigation structure is perhaps the most important element to give attention to as your content grows. Stay tuned for more on this topic – I’ll dive into it more deeply tomorrow.

Hopefully we’ve convinced you to stay the course in your struggle for ongoing SEO success. It’s a never-ending battle, but it pays off well for those who keep at it and hit their goals.

More on SEO: ABCs of SEO, How Blogging can Improve SEO for Your Website