There’s a lot of confusion these days about how to boost search engine results, and the stakes are high. Get this wrong, and you basically don’t exist on the interwebs. Thankfully, anyone who follows a few basic principles can get their site to rank and drive traffic.
What Is SEO?
To understand just what SEO is, we first need to understand what it is NOT. People often get this idea that SEO is some sort of magic pixie dust that some “google expert” can sprinkle under the hood of a website to make Google fall head over heels in love with it. As cool as that would be, it just doesn’t work that way. Especially not now.
There was once a time when you could hire an SEO expert to scam Google, but this is no longer going to pay off for you. SEO is NOT hiring some SEO expert to program the nuts and bolts of your website to increase search engine results. Will tweaking your website’s off-page metadata etc. help? You bet! But that’s a small and dwindling part of what SEO truly is. SEO is more than just using good keywords in your meta description. SEO is all about being creative and excellent.
SEO is a way of doing business.
A way of doing business? Really? Isn’t that a bit on the epic side? Well, hear me out.
Do you remember when you first learned to drive? Did you have to learn certain tricks specifically not to hit pedestrians? Of course not. You learned basic driving skills and safety principles that meant safety for you, those riding with you, and those around you. You probably don’t even think about it, but you drive safely (at least I hope so) by default.
Believe it or not, SEO can be this simple. And I’m going to show you how.
Content Marketing
By now, everyone knows what content marketing is. It’s commonly known that writing blogs, shooting videos, and creating quote graphics are great ways to boost your credibility and market your products and services. But for some reason, many people haven’t quite made the connection with SEO.
It cannot be stated any more strongly: if you do not have a content creation strategy in place, you are losing tons of traffic. SEO.com tells us that credible content not only builds trust and authority, but that “same trust and authority translates well for your link building efforts and helps drive organic web traffic.” In other words, putting out quality content not only makes you look smarter, it also shows Google that you matter, thus driving your SEO thus driving your traffic thus driving your SEO.
SOURCE: KissMetrics
KissMetrics goes one step further and explains that content marketing essentially answers questions asked by SEO. Boosting SEO means having something the public is asking for online – aka content marketing. If you don’t have content consistently going out, you have no SEO. So just create good content, optimize it around some good keywords, fill out your little meta description, etc. and that’s that! No Google genie required.
Social Media
This one is still developing and is sure to be the next big thing in SEO, so it’s important to understand this now. Social media is ceasing to be just a place to find your audience. It’s also becoming a destination all on its own. You may think of Facebook as a great place to look at pictures of your grandkids or friends, but it’s also becoming an extremely hot search engine.
“Facebook can now search for content as easily as people,” according to SEO research conducted by HubSpot. In fact, whereas search king Google processes about 3.5 billion searches a daily, Facebook is gaining on them at 1.5 billion daily searches. Let that sink in.
“Google pays attention to social interactions such as likes, retweets, shares, and even +1’s,” according to a recent article by Entrepreneur. This means that every time you post quality content to a vibrant social media community, it helps you boost your SEO rankings just by getting some engagement and reactions on social media. Link building was the buzzword for SEO a few years ago, but now the secret to boosting SEO rankings is quality content that engages – and social media is where engagement happens. These days, link building means getting your content picked up by someone searching or just surfing their newsfeed and finding your content and using it.
What’s the Secret Sauce?
The secret sauce for improving your search engine rankings is to be yourself, be unique, and post tons of useful information that people see and talk about on social media. In other words, don’t think of search engine optimization as a series of tweaks and tricks. Simply have good ideas! Engage your audience on topics that interest them. Be active where they are active.
And if this way of doing business doesn’t appeal to you, then beware – you just might be left behind. Because these days, it’s a lot more rewarding to just be authentic than to fake being authentic.
If you liked the information I just added to your life, return the favor and drop me a comment! I would love to know your thoughts and answer your questions!
