What is Search Engine Optimization
A Brief Practical Guide for Understanding SEO
Known as SEO, Search Engine Optimization is the art of optimizing websites for search engines. Marketing Agencies, not only design for the users, though User Focused Design should come 1st and foremost, we also in essence design for robots in order to help the Artificial Intelligence & Algorithms these bots are compelled by to understand what they find. Each Search Engine has their own robots crawling the internet 24/7 analyzing everything they find. One of the most powerful advanced SEO practices are done using Schema Markup. For which we wrote it’s own article. So we will leave it out of this one since we are covering a more basic SEO understanding in this article.
Primary Types of SEO
On-Site SEO
On-Site SEO is the foundation of SEO. This is the bedrock upon which your house “Website” will thrive. It becomes the core of your entire web presence. Web presence, overall, is what SEO is all about in the end. The best way we have found to explain On-site SEO is that your website should resemble a University level essay. If you apply all the same principles of academic writing to your site you will get good results; it’s the natural order of things. Let us explain the parallels.
There is a great visual you can easily picture in your mind to capture the number one most important On-Site SEO concept. Think of a pyramid like structure that is a hierarchy of titles. At the top of the pyramid you have the most definitive and concise, relevant to your business keyword title that would absolutely best define the context of the entire page, article post, or entire site. As you go deeper into the content you start seeing it get broken down into more granular aspects of your main title, and finally one more time you will see even more granularity of those subsequent sub-titles but it all can perfectly and logically be traced back to the top of the pyramid; this is called Page or Site Hierarchy because both pages and the entire sites work off the same principle. Let us give you an example in action. In this next example comes one of the 3rd pyramid tier key word for this article.
Technical SEO
Technical SEO is a process that ensures a website meets the technical requirements of modern search engines with the goal of improved organic rankings. Crucial elements of Technical SEO include website crawling, indexing, rendering, and site architecture. Technical optimization for SEO is a must if you want to ensure that your web pages are well structured for both humans and robot crawlers. Our nest title would be considered a 4th tier subtitle, because its part od the 3rd tier subtitle regarding Technical SEO.
Website Performance Optimization
Website Performance Optimization is considered Technical SEO because a lot of the optimization has to do with coding. There are numerous kinds of code web sites use, the main ones are:
• HTML – Can be thought of as the foundational skeletal structure of a website.
• CSS – Is the what makes your HTML to your liking.
• JavaScript – Language that calls in 3rd party code that achieves certain functions.
• PHP – Is the code that represents server language. It tells servers what to do.
These forms of code can be written in many ways to achieve the same thing, however, not everyway works the best. This is where it becomes a technical SEO concern because you need to make sure your sites code is well optimized for best performance results.
Off-Site SEO
Off-Site SEO, also know as Off-Page SEO, refers to work done outside of your website in order to impact your rankings with search engine result pages, also known as SERPs. Along with On-Site SEO, Off-Site includes several factors of basic SEO that help a site to rank. In fact we would say these are the most important factors involved with ranking a website; though, without a proper foundation “On-Site SEO” your house would be built on sand. At Birdie Digital Marketing Agency, we do not build sites on sand 🙂
Optimizing for off-site ranking factors involves improving search engine and user perception of a site’s popularity, relevance, trustworthiness, and authority. This is what you would call your Web Presence. This power is best realized when other reputable places on the Internet “pages, sites, people” linking to or promoting your website, and in this “vouching” for the quality of your content. A great way we have found to think about it is, if you walk into the room with a common person no one thinks anything of you, but walk in with a world famous person and suddenly the assumption is you are somehow more than just commonly important. This is the basic principle behind Website Authority.
Social Media Off-Site SEO
Is an amazingly powerful off-site SEO signal Google pays close attention too as well. This is why Social Media Management is so important and when done right correlates with all on-site elements such as promoting your newest blog post on social media for instance will trigger many SEO signals both off-site and on-site because once the user arrives on your site, then the on-site User Experience SEO signals start to trigger.
In Conclusion
SEO, is arguably the most important Marketing discipline to pay attention too. It should look like a parade of on going events, changes, updates, newly indexed site pages, etc. etc.. Or our favorite analogy is that SEO is like a symphony, and SEO experts need to be like the symphonies conductor. There should be many instruments at play at all times and new shows happening often. This is SEO!
