Organic referencing: What is SEO?

The success of your website is highly dependant on where it shows up in Google or alternate search engines. With the help of SEO, Google can recognize your content as worthwhile and authoritative, and thus, it will rank higher in search results. It might sound complicated at first, but we promise SEO is easy to understand and can be fun! Read on for the lowdown.

Most web traffic is driven by the major search engines, and this includes Google, Bing and Yahoo. Although social media sites play a role in how visible your website is, search engines are the most important as a navigation tool for internet users. As a business owner or entrepreneur, it’s likely that you’ll want your website to get as much online visibility as possible.

Search engines are an excellent way to provide traffic that is targeted for the information on your webpage. Users are generally searching for an answer to a specific question and your content should be created to provide just that.

Of course, for people to want to visit and stay on your page, it is necessary for you to create exciting and useful content. Google and other search engines might be smart, but they still need a little bit of help every once and awhile. Search engines' algorithms rank pages based on their use-value to those online. Further, useful content will often be shared on other sites including blogs, facebook, twitter feeds and so on.

Depending on how often your content is shared, the algorithms will pick up on these signals and hold you as an authority in your market or field. Therefore, the combination of writing credible copy with the amount of time people spend on your site and share your content will work to create a strong search engine ranking.

Curious to learn more about how search engines provide results? Check out "How Search Engines Work".

In a nutshell, good SEO works to make your content available on search engines, ensuring that your website can be found in search engines. This is based on key words and phrases that are relevant to what your website is offering visitors.

This is a form of quality control for online content, as well as a marketing strategy that works to grow visibility organically, or non-paid (as opposed to Google Ads (AdWords) which is paid referencing). As we mentioned, SEO is fun as it encompasses both technical and creative elements to improve the ranking of your content. In turn, traffic is driven towards your site and this creates awareness about your business.

Hopefully, you’re beginning to understand the way that SEO operates. But of course, there are many aspects to SEO, including the words on your pages, as well as the way other sites reference and link your content.

Essentially, it’s a combination of creating a well-structured website while making sure that your site is accessible and user-friendly. Since the internet has become extremely competitive, businesses whose sites utilize SEO better will have an advantage over the amount of visitors and customers.

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As we mentioned, SEO can be fairly complex. However, the basics can be easily learned and applied to your company website. There are many ways to utilize SEO tactics, and these can range from a highly specialized focus to a broader and more general approach. Here, we're going to go over the basics.

First, it is important to identify the keywords that are searched in relation to the services that your website or business is offering. There are numerous online tools to find keywords, but Google Keyword Planner is both free and simple to understand. Once these business-relevant keywords have been identified, you can implement them into your web content, including in blog posts, tweets and hashtags.

Generally, you want to include your keywords a certain number of times on each page. This will help search engines to understand the theme of your page. Try including the primary keyword of your content, or the most searched, and related terms surrounding this keyword.

As noted above, content is important but is not the only way to improve the SEO of your website. A user-friendly experience is another crucial way to maintain high ranking. Your website should have a clear hierarchy as well as multiple topics pertaining to the main focus of your business. Preserving an organized structure will allow for your webpages to be properly optimized and thus, improve your SEO greatly.

Quality content alongside a beautiful website is crucial to building an online following. However, there are always ways to improve. These are just our SEO and organic referencing basics, and a business new or old can always find room to learn and grow.