SEO and Link Building: A Basic Guide

What is SEO?

SEO stands for search engine optimization. SEO helps to increase website traffic and exposure to your business through search engine results. It’s all about understanding what people are searching for online, words they use and the content they want to look at.

Why is SEO important?

“SEO is important because it helps people find information and discover pages on the world wide web”. It can assist you to reach more prospects and most of online traffic is driven by search engines.

How does it work?

When looking at how search engines work, there are essential 3 functions.

1.    Crawling is the process of robots or crawlers finding new content.

2.    Indexing, which stores and manages the content found.

3.    Ranking takes the content that best fits a searchers query that are listed from most relevant to least.

If people would like to go about SEO successfully, Rand Fishkin founder of SEOmoz has made a guide for you to follow.

1.    Crawl accessibility so engines can read your website

2.    Compelling content that answers the searcher’s query

3.    Keyword optimized to attract searchers and engines

4.    Great user experience including a fast load speed and compelling UX

5.    Share-worthy content that earns links, citations, and amplification

6.    Title, URL, and description to draw high CTR in the rankings

7.    Snippet/schema markup to stand out in SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages)

What is Link Building?

Link Building is the process of acquiring hyperlinks from other websites to your website. Links are there for users to navigate from one page to another page in the web.

 Why is Link Building important? 

Link Building is important because you want to make your website link worthy. It can also help you build relationships, increase traffic, and build you brand.

Search engines use links in 2 ways:

1.   Discover new website pages

2.   Determine how well a page should rank

How is a link created?

1.   Start of link tag

2.   Link referral location

3.   Visible/anchor test of link

4.   Closure of link tag

2022 Issues in the world of SEO

When it comes to issues in the world of SEO, I found this article “8 SEO Mistakes Weakening Your Google Ranking in 2022 and Beyond” written by Mark Walker Ford on Social MediaToday.com. One issue I thought was important to take note of, is not writing a sufficient amount of content as this has a correlation to having better ranks if you have more content on your website. Another issue he mentions is having duplicate content on your website and this can be very bad as google can give you penalty, it can be entirely removed or not appear in search results anymore, so make sure your content is always original.

If you made it this far in reading my blog, thanks for tuning in and learning about SEO and Link Building.