Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a popular marketing buzzword these days.
Having “content” is great, but “SEO optimized” content sounds way better and way more exciting.
But what does it mean for something to be “SEO optimized”? How can you optimize your content? What’s the point of SEO? How difficult is SEO?
There’s a lot of misunderstanding surrounding SEO, and in this article, we’re going to break it all down for you so that you can build a winning SEO strategy.
1. Bad content that is optimized is still bad content.
When it comes to search engine algorithms, people become obsessed with optimizing their content with boatloads of keywords and phrases.
While this is smart in theory, too many keywords can often make your content unreadable. If the content sounds clunky, reads badly, or looks “off”, it’s probably not going to do super well in the algorithm.
At Zynk30, we help our clients by providing them with SEO optimized, high-quality, professional content that won’t just help our clients have winning sites, but will also give their viewers and potential customers a quality user experience.
It’s important to publish content, and it’s important to optimize content with keywords for SEO purposes, but if the content isn’t good, it’s not going to get the views that you’re after.
2. If your website isn’t great, your SEO won’t be either.
Search engines like Google are in the game of providing a good user experience for their users. This has become more and more true over recent years.
Have you ever heard of a “good user experience” that was lagging or sluggish?
Some websites have even done research and found a detectable correlation between response time and Google ranking.
It’s not the most important part of SEO, but it is something that can ruin you if not done properly. Having a good quality website is just as important as the keywords that you use for optimization.
3. Too many keywords can crush you.
When most people think of SEO, the first thing that comes to mind is probably the keywords and phrases, because these seem to be the most directly correlated to a high spot of the SEO rankings.
I know when I started writing SEO-optimized content, I thought that keywords were the only thing that mattered. It’s a common mistake.
However, SEO is really more complex than just “using the right words”. Instead of using a zillion keywords in every sentence that you have on your site, it’s better to use them sparingly and significantly. Include keywords in website segments like Call-to-Actions and descriptions.
For the most part, only use SEO keywords when necessary. But overdoing it with your keywords will actually hurt your chances of getting a good SEO ranking.
4. Mobile is very important.
Approximately half of all web traffic is mobile.
Because of this, mobile performance is about half of what makes up your SEO ranking. If your mobile site is not good, your SEO rankings are going to be, well, not good.
So what’s the solution?
Pay just as much attention to your desktop site as you do to your mobile site. If you want to build a winning website, you have to build a site that is winning both on a traditional desktop and on mobile devices.
It’s a bit more work, but it’s essential.
5. Don’t forget about link building.
Think of your website as a digital home for your business.
“Link building” is using different hyperlinks to connect the different rooms of your “home” to other rooms, and vice versa. Linking from one page to another is just one way that you can optimize your site. There is a direct correlation between good backlinks and high SEO rankings.
At Zynk30, we take our own medicine, so throughout this article, you’ll notice a handful of different links that connect our different articles and business services back to this article.
It’s also important to know that it’s not good just to throw random hyperlinks throughout your content — these links need to be relevant.
Keep that in mind as you are building your site.
6. On-Page SEO
On-page SEO is basically every aspect of your website that can be optimized through content. This includes keywords, tags, and all of the different types of content.
On-page SEO also includes all of the different backlinks and other internal links that you can use on your site.
It’s important to remember that on-page SEO is just half of SEO, you also need to pay attention to the technical aspects of your website that help content optimization. See below for more on this.
7. Off-Page SEO
The other half of SEO comes from off the page. This is called “off-page SEO”, for obvious reasons.
Off-page SEO encompasses content-related optimization and technically-oriented optimization. Social media marketing, email marketing, and guest blogging (promoting your business on other websites) are all other aspects of off-page SEO that you can use to grow your website without actually changing the content on your site.
Building a strong SEO strategy includes both on-page and off-page SEO.
Closing thoughts
SEO is an essential part of any marketing plan.
But when it comes to SEO, a lot of people think that it’s best to take the easy way out.
These people would be horribly mistaken because SEO is a long-term solution to building your digital audience. Writing one optimized blog post is not as good as writing several posts for months and months. With SEO, content is king, but good content is the supreme ruler.
As the search engines become smarter and smarter, it’s going to be harder and harder to “hack” the SEO systems.
Think of SEO as a game. Think of companies like us, Zynk30, as the pros. We’re here to help our clients turn their followers into sales, and SEO is one of the most important strategies that we use in order to help our clients build digital audiences and improve their Google rankings.
If you’re struggling with SEO, think of us as a cheat code. We’ll come in, revamp your content, and before you know it, you won’t just be an SEO-optimized site, you’ll be dominating the search engine game.
If you’re struggling to boost your SEO ranking, shoot us an email and we can help you take your brand to the next level.