What Is SEO and Why Is It Important?
My friends, it’s 2020. If you’re still wondering what SEO is, you’ve definitely been under a rock for the past 10 years. Actually, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has technically been around for over 20 years now…but don’t worry, we’re going to break it down for you ASAP so you’ll be right up to speed!
In plain terms: SEO is used to help your content be “searchable” or to help viewers find it online.
You probably directly associate SEO with Google. And yes, nowadays the main concern for most brands would be SEO for Google. But this applies to anything and everything that’s online. You want your social media content to come up? Optimize it with a better hashtag strategy… but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
You may have heard the term “SEO Keywords”.. that just means words you could use to describe your brand/product/service. Whatever you could imagine people typing in when they search for you.
Once upon a time, If you wanted to rank well, you just repeated those keywords enough times throughout your webpages & meta tags, and BOOM you were ranking in the top 10. Nowadays that’s considered a pretty spammy practice, so it’s not a “thing” anymore.
As search engines evolve, so do their algorithms. So nowadays the intricacies of “what ranks” are so complex it’ll make you think twice about what “Big Brother is watching”. Aside from factoring in on-page content, domain names, directory listings, Google’s algorithm also factors in dates of publications, popularity of subject matter, heading structure, original author, anchor text, the breadcrumbing or site structure, the quantity & quality of external links pointing to a website, and the list goes on!
Did I lose you yet?
I didn’t even talk about monetizing your keywords, but we’ll leave that for another day.
Basically, what I’m trying to say is first of, SEO is incredibly important. Now more than ever since everyone’s doing it and the algorithms are trickier. You can set up some meta tags and plop in some keywords here and there, but in order to see results, it’s always best to move forward with an expert that knows how to do it right. For more on SEO, you can check out this article.