
If you have a website for your business, chances are you’ve heard your fair share about the importance of SEO — whether you understand what it really means or not. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, and as MOZ so eloquently explained, it’s “the practice of increasing both the quality and quantity of website traffic, as well as exposure to your brand, through non-paid (also known as ‘organic’) search engine results.” SEO is all about understanding what people are searching for online — what keywords they’re using, what questions they’re asking, what type of content they’re consuming — so that you can position your website to be more easily found and prominently displayed in those search results.
When a user types a query into a search engine, it will scour thousands of pieces of content, evaluating a number of factors such as keywords, meta description, posting frequency and more, to determine which websites best fit the needs of the user. Websites that incorporate good SEO are more likely to show up at the top of the list of results organically (i.e., not via paid ads). There are a ton of components of good SEO and it really does take time to digest all of the best practices in order to do it well, which is why many businesses choose to hire an SEO professional to oversee it for them.
But if you’d like to try to tackle your website’s SEO in-house, it’s important to understand the basics before trying to implement complicated strategies or you risk incorporating bad SEO tactics that can actually harm your ranking. Consider this post the bunny slope for SEO. It’s important to spend time understanding and practicing the basics before climbing higher up the mountain where you could risk injury.