Improving Competitiveness With SEO
What is Search Engine Optimization?
Search Engine Optimization or SEO is a practice to increase exposure to your brand, and the quality and quantity of website traffic. SEO helps people find content that answers their questions and curiosities through online searching. Knowing the answers to these questions through content with keywords will allow you to connect with the people who are searching for solutions online. When businesses understand keywords (terms and phrases used to generate traffic to your website) people search for which correlate to what that business has to offer in terms of products or services, it increases website traffic.
How do search engines work and how can you utilize them?
When you look for something online, the search engine will go through billions of contents to generate lists to find content that might answer your question. Content that has either words, phrases, titles, and more that are associated with what you typed in the search bar will appear in your search engine results pages or SERP. This process is called crawling and indexing. The searches through the web and ranking content by relevancy and matches of a search is how crawling and indexing provide results that best suggest an answer to your question.
In order to show up in the higher rankings of SERP, it’s important to first establish a way to have crawl access. No matter how great the content is that you provide, you can’t get traffic if you are not discoverable to be crawled. Next, it's important to create content that is compelling and has keyword optimization. Keywords can get you higher on the ranking lists, it attracts searchers and engines.
Organic search results drive more traffic to websites than paid advertisements. Although social media, paid ads, and other online platforms bring traffic to websites, search engines drive the majority of online traffic. When creating content that has the right keywords that drives a high ranking, more continuous traffic will result from organic searches than a paid advertisement that requires you to keep putting in money. Content can be in any form, webpage, video, PDF, etc. But no matter the format, content is discovered by links.
What is Link Building?
Creating content that people are searching for that answers their questions in an engaging way are great qualities, but alone do not guarantee it’ll rank. Link building can help give your brand a one-up on SERP. There are many links you can incorporate in your content; internal, external, linking profiles, and more. One way is internal links, these are links that connect internal pages with the same domain, linking to other content of your own. It’s also important to make sure these links are relevant and from credible and similar websites.
Engines evaluate these links to rank using the concept of EAT, or expert, authoritative, and trustworthy. Engines see sites that are Expert, authoritative, and trustworthy as better for guiding SEO. This is also good for websites in general as it provides great value to searchers. Websites that link other credible and EAT links will be seen as valuable and great for engines to crawl through.
Link Building is not solely about search engine rankings but can further build a deeper connection within your website. Search engines should not be the only way people can access informative content on your website.
Trends of SEO in 2020: BERT
Within the past year, Google has changed the way we know search engines through BERT. BERT stands for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers. In simpler terms, BERT changes the way computers understand language similar to the way humans do. It’ll process words in the context of a sentence rather than understanding a word one-by-one.
It’s intended to better understand the reasons behind a search query to provide a better SERP for searchers. BERT is unlikely to be optimized by SEOs. Keywords and phrases in the content do not change, but Google is changing the way your content might be ranked for better searches.