Search engine optimization (SEO) can be confusing.
This article is meant to simplify SEO for business owners, so they can best understand what needs to be done to their website and why.
Here are the 4 Pillars of SEO:
- Website Content & Keywords
- Code & Guidelines
- Popularity & Link Building
- Content Marketing Strategy
Website Content & Keywords
The most important factor for SEO is your pages, the content, and the keywords included on them. There are a few technicalities here based on percentage of keywords and best practices, which we won’t discuss in full, although I will say this: there’s no fast or cheat way to achieve success with website content and keywords. Google rewards websites with powerful, unique content with keywords that naturally flow within the content.
Tip: Write high quality content that speaks to the end user, then go back and evaluate if you can fit more keywords in where appropriate.
Code & Guidelines
Google has requirements and rules on what’s appropriate for ranking your website in their search results. How efficient your website loads, how fast your hosting is, user behavior statistics, whether your website is responsive and looks good on all devices, as well as the cleanliness of your code are examples that affect how good your rankings will be in Google search.
There are technical SEO tasks that fit into this category such as registering your website with Google Search Console or Bing Webmaster Tools. Google also reads your website differently than humans do. Meta tags, ALT tags, schema, and other website code-related items are important within this pillar of SEO.
Tip: Fast website = higher rankings. Clean website code, website speed plugins, and fast hosting are important overlooked factors that play a major role. Don’t cheap out on web hosting. Invest in fast web hosting to see improved results.
Popularity & Link Building
Google evaluates how popular your website is based on how many quality relevant links are pointing to your website. Are there other websites that link to yours? This tells Google that your website is important and therefore should be given higher priority in search. This includes how active on social media you are and how many people are liking, commenting, and sharing your posts. Is your website listed in business directories and authoritative websites?
Tip: Sharing well-written, relevant blog posts from your website on social media and boosting your post with ads will give you a boost in SEO juice.
Content Marketing Strategy
Writing ongoing content on your website, usually on your blog (or landing pages) and sent out to social media and your email newsletter list, will help you achieve SEO success. Being consistent can be difficult, which is why we developed our Content Marketing Strategy document.
First, you update your blog, then you share your blog post on social media and use that same blog content (rewritten) for your email newsletter. This is the most efficient way to maximize results from your content writing.
Read our article on the most efficient Content Marketing Strategy and how to roll it out.
We’ve designed our marketing packages based on this methodology. Whether you are taking on some of these tasks in-house or you’d like to hire a marketing agency to manage all of this for you, we have the Internet marketing package that suits your needs.
