SEO Made Easy

Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is a buzzword used by marketers quite often. Despite its common usage in conversation, this idea seems to elude many small business owners. So, I’ve written this article to help keep it simple. So without further ado, let’s jump into it.

What Is SEO?

SEO is the technique used to increase a website’s or web page’s chance of being found through a search engine, such as Google, Bing, Yahoo!, or DuckDuckGo. The goal of SEO is to appear at the top of page 1 of the search results. This means, when someone types in keywords related to your business, you appear before your competitors. By applying SEO techniques, search engines like Google can evaluate your website and increase its rank in the search results.

How to Improve Website Ranking

There are three key things that search engines look for when evaluating your website. They are:

1. Trust
2. Authority
3. Relevance

Building Trust

Trust is a long-term process and must be kept in mind when doing anything to your website. Trust is tracked by a variety of metrics. Some are as simple as having an SSL certificate on your website. Links from other trustworthy sites help, such as Facebook. This shows that your site has more legitimacy than a random “pop-up” site.

Building Authority

When it comes to authority, there are two kinds to keep in mind: Page Authority and Domain Authority. Authority is built through quality content and high-value external links to your web page or website.

Page Authority is unique to each of the individual pages of your website. This is why articles on a blog may be found before the home page of a website. Search engines will prioritize individual pages over generic pages depending on the specificity of the keywords being searched for. This is why it’s important to have a blog on your website. It allows you to add more keywords that are relevant to your industry making it easier for potential clients or customers to find you.

Domain Authority is uniform across your entire site. This is determined by the age, size, and popularity of the domain. This is also transferable, meaning technically you can buy a domain with high authority and build an entirely new website on it and it would maintain that authority level. However, this will be reevaluated over time, so this isn’t a permanent strategy.

Building Relevance

Relevancy is evaluated based on the quantity and quality of the backlinks to your website. The number of links to an article on your site is considered a Citation Flow. Each of these links is then evaluated based on the other two factors (trust and authority) of the sites in which contain the backlink. This evaluative metric is known as Trust Rank.

The goal when building the relevancy of your site is to gain as many high-quality links you can to your website. This is most easily done through writing or creating high-value blog articles that people want to share. Additionally, you can make this easier by adding ‘share’ buttons to your articles as well as sharing the article yourself.

What’s Next?

Now, that you’ve got a basic understanding of SEO, what should you do next? Well, you’ll notice that the writing of blog articles touches each one of the three factors in improving a website. So, if you haven’t built a blog into your website, that’s step 1. If you have built one, start writing articles.

Insider Tip: You don’t need to write your own articles, just ask the experts!

But Wait, There’s More!

If you found this article useful, please share it with a friend. Also, check out my other article on how to build your SEO with a Facebook Page.

If you would like more about online marketing and how to apply it to your business, here is a FREE Resources I’ve been working on. This Checklist is meant to help small business owners and entrepreneurs expand their reach and build brand awareness via online marketing. 🤩

Click the link to download now and let me know what you think. If it helps you or your business, feel free to leave me a review.

Also, if you have any questions about business or online marketing, shoot me an email. I’d love to help! ❤