A Layman’s Guide to Understand How SEO Works

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Online marketing doesn’t stop when you finally launch your site. The moment you do, you’re already in competition with a ton of other businesses wanting to market the exact same product/services, targeting the exact same market you have in mind.

The First Sugary Drink

Imagine marketing the very first sugared drink. It’s unique, quenches your thirst, and offers the public a new alternative to water. It would’ve been quite easy to market that product. It’s the first of its kind so you’ve already got a value proposition that’s different from anything else the market has heard.

Being first matters, it’s the reason why the first ever painkiller would’ve been highly successful. It’s the same reason the first mac n cheese pack would’ve sold hundreds if not millions. There was nothing else like it before so it’s easy to tell people how great an opportunity they’d pass up if they missed this product or that one.

Saturated Marketplace

These days, though, the market for sugared drinks is already saturated. Consumers have a wealth of flavors, bottle shapes and colors along with drink add-ons they can choose from. With so much competition, there’s a pressing need, now more than ever, to distinguish your product, your brand, from the rest of the pack.

That’s where search engine optimization or SEO comes in. SEO gives you a way to set yourself apart from your competition. It’s not going to make your product be the first of its kind ever but it could make enough noise to help customers—those who would willingly pay for your service—to find their way to you and your products.

How SEO Works

That’s basically what an SEO company does. It provides excellent SEO services, which are a type of marketing that helps your customers find you.

But running an SEO campaign can be confusing. First-timers can find it especially hard to navigate. Here’s what you need to know if you want to start a successful SEO campaign:

Moz defines SEO or search engine optimization as a kind of marketing that focuses on boosting organic search engine in an organic or non-paid way. That means no paid traffic. So if you’ve got paid marketing, then wait until that’s over before you start your organic SEO campaign.

Hongkiat categorizes SEO even further into 5 different campaign aspects: keyword research, the development of a search engine friendly site, along with on-page SEO, link building efforts, and analytics. Here’s what you can look forward to with each one:

Keyword Research

How do you help your customers find you? You’ve got to research on the kind of keywords that people use to find the products/services you provide. Make sure the keywords display a high search volume (plenty of people use it) and a low competition volume (low number of sites uses it). When you’ve finally got this out of the way, says Search Engine Journal, and you’ve finally generated the keywords you’d like to optimize your pages for, then you can start. Simply incorporate those keywords into your content. Don’t overdo it, though. If it’s raining keywords in a page, search engine bots could flag your page for it and decrease your ranking on the search engine results pages or SERPs.

Search-Engine Friendly Site

This means designing your site in a way that search engines like. So you’ve got to make sure everything—from your tags, Meta tags and titles to your links—checks out. Rewrite URLs if you must, says Search Engine Watch. Add breadcrumbs in your pages. Revise the headers, optimize any images you’re using by adding an Alt tag phrase and basically make sure no canonicalization issues exist. You can explore all these if you want to turn your site search engine friendly.

On-Page SEO

On-page SEO factors have to do with your title tags, URLs, content, and images. So make sure you do your best to optimize your page by changing these on-page factors to reflect your keywords. If you’ve already got the title tags and URLs down, then the content should be next on your list.

By this time, you should already know how much of a big no-no duplicate content is. In the past, content farms used to churn out hundreds of articles by spinning them. So if you’ve got pages that use spun content, take the content out as soon as you can. If you don’t, you could doom your pages to low page rankings. Google’s algorithm updates like Google Panda and Penguin made sure to penalize content farms using spun content. So if you don’t want to wake up one morning to find your pages dropping by almost 50% in their rankings, then make sure you get rid of duplicate content in your pages.

Another thing that’s important is the freshness and relevance of your content. While ensuring your content passes muster with the search engine bots, that’s not the only thing you should watch out for. Consumer engagement and interest is another driving factor. It doesn’t matter if you have the perfect content up there, according to the bots, at least, not if the content is boring to your audience. Make your content attractive. Turn it into something your audience will want to hear, see or read every day.

Link Building

They’re a wealth of effective link building practices out there. With plenty of practice and tips, you’ll be able to improve your search engine rankings with better link building efforts.

Analytics

This helps you measure the results of your SEO campaigns. Why does that matter? Anything that helps you determine where your campaigns work and where they don’t is the key to developing better campaign strategies. If you know what’s wrong, or where the user experience keeps tripping customers up, then you can take steps to improve on them, allowing you to eventually come up with better campaigns.

Conclusion

These are just a few things you need to know if you’re determined to get your SEO campaigns off the ground. By knowing how SEO works, you have a solid idea on how to improve your site design, content, and marketing to ensure steady consumer engagement and interest in the future.

This article is written by Sumity Paul. She is a freelance content writer and writes for a variety of online publications. She is fond of writing content on different trendy topics. When she is not working, she loves to cook, dance and travel. Content Ref: SeoTuners. Follow Her: Twitter | Google+.