“I need a website with SEO.”

Lately, we've been hearing the term SEO thrown around, but with little understanding of what it really means or how it works. Usually, the comment circles around "I need a website with SEO." But, what is the point of paying for something if you don't really know what it is? A big part of what we do here at Kicks Digital Marketing is client education. We stress the importance of knowing how your digital footprint impacts your business and what it can do for you if you are willing to take the time to work for it. For the sake of this article, we are only going to discuss on-site SEO. Let's begin.

What is SEO?

SEO is the abbreviation for search engine optimization. Nowadays, SEO can be an action as well as a job title (search engine optimizers). The core purpose of SEO is to optimize your website or online strategy to be able to provide the best opportunity for organic rank and online traffic acquisition. But where does it start and where does it end? It all starts with your website.

SEO and Content Strategy

When you embark on a web design project with the purpose of revamping your overall online strategy, content plays a major role. Content writers research trending topics and keywords relating to your services and determine the best terms and phrases to use for your static page content, blog posts, and social media updates. The higher quality the content and the more often a keyword appears in context (keyword density), the more likely it will return when a user keys in a related search on Google. But, it doesn't end there.

Website Structure and SEO

Once your content goes from draft to site-ready, it is now time to plug it into your website design in a way that makes it easy for search engines to crawl and read your page. All sites use a similar structure that sort code and content based on the level of importance as shown below.

Title Tag

Your page title defines what the page is about. Titles will show up in Google search results pages as the first bold line followed by other important pieces of information.

URL

The URL of a page shows up on the second line of Google search results. A URL should contain a keyword related to the purpose of the page or match the page title and be under 50 characters.

Meta Description

Tools like Yoast or Kicks Digital custom plugin will allow you to maintain the information that is presented on search engine results pages. Key in a short description of the page using related keywords while keeping it limited to 160 characters.

Headings

If you are familiar with Buzzfeed, you are already familiar with headings. Headings are used in the body of your website and help search engines crawl and read the site with ease. Each heading breaks apart the content much like "chapters" in a book.

• H1: the most important heading
• H2
• H3
• H4
• H5
• H6: the least important heading

As you can see, headings create a hierarchal rank for your content. But, what if you have images on your page to compliment text?

Images and SEO

Images are a great way to bring visual appeal to your website, landing pages, and blog posts. When you upload your photo to a Wordpress media gallery, you are able to include image descriptions and other identifiers for a specific image such as alt text and image title. Include relevant information about each image to frame the content of the text surrounding the image to give search engines a better idea of what it relates to.

Enough With The Tech Talk

Every single item discussed in this article are all components of traditional websites. All websites developed on our custom Wordpress platform follow the best practices and standards to provide your website the best opportunity for quality organic search traffic and rank. The question is, what will you do with this knowledge?

If you are uncertain about your website and digital footprint, drop us a line and let us know. We'd be happy to walk through your site and discuss how you can optimize your website to improve your rank opportunity.