If you’re totally new to SEO and want to learn more about it in depth, check out a great beginner’s guide here.

According to Google, the World Wide Web is comprised of over 60 trillion individual pages. By understanding and using SEO effectively, you can make yourself stand out from the trillions of other pages vying for you customer’s attention.

Search engines work by crawling and indexing all of the sites on the Internet. In order to generate relevant results complex algorithms are used to help sort the results and rank pages by popularity.

When searching for a restaurant, dentist, or a new pair of shoes online, we are naturally inclined to click on the websites near the top of the page. That’s because as consumers, we’ve instilled trust in those top tier search results. As a business, you want to be in those top results.

Today we’re going to dive into two elements of proper SEO marketing: keywords and search ranking. Keywords are the specific words a search engine uses to match your web page up with a search query. Understanding which keywords to use for your business is crucial because the right keywords can work as a guide to draw your target market to your site.

A common mistake people are guilty of is solely focusing on the amount of traffic being directed to your site. Traffic is important, but what’s even more important is attracting the right traffic. If you’re not using the right words, you’re missing the opportunity to help your target customers discover your business. 

Driving visitors who are looking for a different kind of site will only result in frustration for them – and no sales for you. If you’re just starting to brainstorm keywords for your site, the most important thing to ask yourself is what keywords fit the content on your website.

You want to consider clever keyword that capture your brand – but aren’t terms that are so niche no one would ever search for them. If you’re selling organic gluten free vegan cookies, simply using “cookies” or “bakery” is far too broad. Consider terms like “vegan muffins” “Greensboro, NC” or “unique vegan muffins.”

---

Tools like this keyword explorer can help give you real-time data on the terms you should be using!

---

So, are keywords the only thing that determine your search ranking? Not by a long shot. The usability of your website also plays a big role. Just like with a brick and mortar store, the experience a customer has when they visit you influences their impression of your business and determines a potential sale. If your website is easy to navigate, welcoming, and stimulating, more people are likely to visit, make a purchase, and return.

If you’re interested in allllllllll the other factors that can effect a website’s rank, take a look at this in depth study from Moz.

Social media can also be used to improve your site’s rank. Social media sites rank in searches, many people use social sites to perform searches, and most people agree social accounts have an impact on your website ranking. The easier viewers can share your content the better off you’ll be!

Keyword selection, usability, and social are just a few of the factors that influence ranking. If you’re out on the web searching for different ways to keep increasing your ranking remember there are some SEO methods that you’re better off avoiding. Paid links, deception, and spamming to boost popularity are considered black hat SEO. Using black hat methods can result in a loss of credibility and even cause your website to become banned on search engines.

For more on SEO, check out our rundown of do's + don't. Then, jump in and put the SEO tips you've learned to use! 

One of the most common questions we hear is “How do I make my website come up first on Google?”

That’s a great question -- one with a complicated answer. The short answer is SEO, but the long answer requires diving into what SEO is. It’s important to understand that there are a number of ways to improve your SEO, some of which require a developer or paying for ranking -- but the ideas we’ve compiled here are meant to be easy to execute, no matter what your skill level.

First things first, what does SEO even stand for? SEO means Search Engine Optimization. It can refer to anything that helps increase the authority and relevancy of your site.

Let’s let Cristers Media explain more about how that process works:

“The way Google and other search engines display websites is this: Google has automated computer systems working around the clock that randomly visit websites all over the Internet, take snapshots of each page, and file them away in a massive database.

As part of taking a snapshot of each web page, Google's system reads every word and other content on a web page in order to determine the specific subject of the page. Google uses this collected data to determine which web pages to show, and in what order, for a particular keyword search.

In other words, Google's computer algorithms dynamically determine which web page on the Internet is the most relevant for a specific keyword or key phrase and displays it first. It then displays the second most relevant page, and so on. The resulting list of web pages is known as a Search Engine Results Page (SERP).”

So now that you know what SEO is, how do you improve it? And what should you avoid doing?

DO:

1. Do keep your content fresh with high quality content. The more frequently you update the content on your site, the happier your customers (and Google) will be with you. Providing customers + clients with original content on a regular basis ups the frequency with which a search engine will crawl and recatalog the pages on your site. The more frequently your pages are cataloged, the more opportunities you have to rise in the search rankings. To provide a frame of reference, a site that is updated daily, or at least 2-3 times a week, is considered a frequently updated site.  
    
2. Do include keywords where it counts. Keywords are words or phrases in your content that people will search for in order to find your site -- it’s how the search engine matches up a query with your specific website. You’ll want to do research on which words to use, because you have to think like your customers in order to narrow down the proper search terms. Keep in mind that people will often perform a search using general or plain language terms instead of technical jargon.
    
3. Do get social. Social media serves as a way to push your content out -- this puts it in front of more eyes, increasing the chance of getting an external link to your site. An external link is simply any other website (hopefully one with high authority) that points to your site. External links demonstrate and increase the credibility of your site.
   
   Secondarily, if your content is widely shared on social media it can contribute to a website's authority just like external links can (more on that in a minute). It’s another way that Google validates your content, leading to a small bump in domain authority.
    
4. Do utilize Google Webmaster Tools. Google Webmasters is a free toolset by Google, for, well...webmasters. They help you do things like track your website’s search presence, see subscriber stats, and measure your overall website performance. Specifically, Search Console will help you make sure Google can access your content, hide content you don’t want show in the results, and monitor any malware issues.
    
5. Do include outbound links. Practically the opposite of an external link, outbound links refer from your site to someone else's. When you link out to other domains, it helps the search engine to understand your “niche” and it helps increase the perceived quality of your site.

DONT:

1. Don’t have a slow load speed. A faster page speed (the time it takes for each individual page to load) is show to lead to a higher rank and conversion rate. Google’s also indicated that site speed (the speed of a sampling of all the pages together) is an influencing factor on page rank. Plus, no one likes waiting around for a website to load, so your customers will be happy too.
    
2. Don’t use paid links. Google is firmly against manipulation of their site results -- specifically people sneakily buying their way to the top. Things like display ads are fine, because they’re a regular tool of marketing, but just regular linked text can come across the wrong way to Google. If you want a search engine to ignore something that really is a paid link, you should use a “nofollow” tag -- but, we promised this wasn’t an article for developers, so if you need to learn more about that check this out.
    
3. Don’t keyword stuff. When you’re blatantly cramming tons of keywords in the content of your article, or in the meta tags of your site it’s called keyword stuffing. It’s obvious you’re trying to up your rankings (in a way that isn’t valuable to the reader) and it can lead to your site being penalized -- or even banned.
    
4. Don’t duplicate content. Content that appears on the Internet more than once is called duplicate content. When there are multiple pieces of identical content on the Internet, it’s hard for search engines to decide which is more relevant. It’s important to note that there is no penalty for duplicate content, but rather rewards for original content (source).
    
5. Don’t have broken links. In addition to harming the user experience of your website, broken links can stop a webcrawler from seeing the rest of your site. Web crawlers function by moving from the root of your site (main page) down to the different pages, subpages, and blog entries. When they hit a broken link they can’t crawl any further -- and might end up missing other pages on your site.

As you can see from all these do’s and dont’s, SEO can be pretty complicated. But the impact of doing things right can mean transforming your site from a deserted corner of the innerwebs to one of the most popular Internet hangouts around.

Looking to read more on SEO? We’ve got even more in-depth reading for you here and here.