Definition: According to Wikipedia, SEO is “the process of affecting the visibility of a website or a web page in a search engine’s unpaid results.”
Alright, let’s translate that to English. Here’s my go at it:
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of optimizing your online content so that a search engine likes to show it as a top result for searches of a certain keyword.
Guess how many blog posts people publish each day.
Any ideas?
Well, WordPress users alone publish over 2 million posts every day. That comes out to 24 blog posts every second.
That means that users published around 216 blog posts while you were reading these five sentences.
And that’s only counting WordPress users. If we were to count all blog posts, that number would surely be higher.
This makes it kind of tough to stand out. But you have to if you want to make your blog a successful one.
While I often spend 4-5 hours writing my blog posts, the ten minutes I spend optimizing each post are easily the most important.
No wonder millions of people Google the term “SEO” each month.
On any given day, people conduct more than 2.2 million searches. And that’s just on Google — to say nothing of the other search engines.
Therefore, showing up on the front page of Google can be the deciding factor between a business that’s thriving and one that’s, well, bankrupt.
VIDEO: SEO Explained
Why does my website need SEO?
The majority of web traffic is driven by the major commercial search engines, Google, Bing, and Yahoo!. Although social media and other types of traffic can generate visits to your website, search engines are the primary method of navigation for most Internet users.
This is true whether your site provides content, services, products, information, or just about anything else.
Search engines are unique in that they provide targeted traffic—people looking for what you offer. Search engines are the roadways that make this happen.
If search engines cannot find your site, or add your content to their databases, you miss out on incredible opportunities to drive traffic to your site.
Search queries—the words that users type into the search box—carry extraordinary value. Experience has shown that search engine traffic can make (or break) an organization’s success.
Targeted traffic to a website can provide publicity, revenue, and exposure like no other channel of marketing. Investing in SEO can have an exceptional rate of return compared to other types of marketing and promotion.
Does Blogging Help with SEO?
You’ve probably noticed how much we love to talk about blogs and we like to think there’s a good reason. Blogs have all kinds of benefits for your website; they can increase awareness of your site, give you a platform to share your knowledge and expertise with your community, and show off your websites’ personality.
This alone makes a blog a great strategy for your website – but did you know that it can also help with your website’s ranking on search engines?
How Does Blogging Help?
It helps keep your website updated.
Let’s face it: there are more neglected and abandoned websites out there than even Google can shake a stick at. That’s why search engines are constantly checking the time stamps on when websites are updated.
Publishing blog posts is a very logical and natural way to update your website frequently, which is a signal to search engines that it’s being taken care of and is a good place to send web users. A new blog post even every couple of weeks will show those ‘bots that things are happening on your website.
It increases the number of pages on your website.
This is the real secret to SEO. The more content you have, the more the search engines will have to crawl and index. This helps give the crawlers a better understanding of just what your website is about, and which types of searches it should rank highly for.
A blog can be a great SEO strategy for your website – and what’s even better is that you don’t have to focus specifically on the SEO aspect for it to work!
Sure, there are a few things you’ll need to check off the list to make sure you’re getting the right attention from search engines.
As long as you’re writing high-quality content on topics that interest your readers, posting on a regular schedule, and sharing your posts, you’ll be able to enjoy all the benefits of having a blog – including SEO!