SEO Crash Course
It’s time to switch gears on the blog! We’ve been heavily focused on social media over the past couple of months, especially in regards to churches and ministries. We announced the launch of our Harbor service, which you can find more information about here. We discussed how to form a social media strategy as well as some practical tips for planning and posting. However, it’s time to go back to the topic of websites and ALL the areas that relate to it. SEO is one of those such areas, so let’s dive into SEO, what it means, its impact on your website, and why it should be on your radar.
What is SEO?
SEO is a buzzword that I’m sure you’ve seen a hundred times if you try to read anything about reaching greater audiences. SEO stands for “search engine optimization.” At its core, SEO is talking about the process of getting traffic to your content (usually your website) through results on search engines like Google. Most importantly, it’s about optimizing your appearance on search engine results pages - a.k.a. trying to get your site and content to appear toward the top of the search results.
What are the pieces of SEO?
So, there are three pieces to SEO. The first piece is On-Page Optimization, which is the process of making sure your content is relevant and providing a good user experience. This is usually where the topic of keywords arises. The second piece is Off-Page Optimization, which is the process of enhancing your site’s rankings through activities outside of your site. This is where backlinks usually come into play. Lastly, there’s the Technical Optimization. So, these are efforts to improve SEO that have nothing to do with content. An example would be submitting your sitemap to Google because it streamlines the crawling and indexing processes that search engines complete.
Why is SEO important?
The main reason why SEO is so important is because we all use search engines every single day. Think about how many times in a day you hop on Google to search for some random piece of information or a recommendation for a service or a million other things. Google isn’t the only search engine out there, but it has become synonymous with search engines in general.
The point is that whenever people are searching for whatever service it is that you provide, you want your website and information to be at the top of the list. You want it to organically be one of the first options that Google or Bing or whatever search engine recommends. SEO is necessary to get more eyes on your business or content, and I think every business can admit how much we need and desire that.
So, have you ever focused on your site’s SEO? What questions do you have about SEO? Leave us a comment and let us know.
One of the services we offer here at The Digital Shore is web design. For more information on our process, you can click here. We’ll be back later this month to talk about forming an SEO strategy.