Search engine optimization, commonly referred to as SEO, refers to programming a website so it will rank high in the search engine listings. There are two types of search-engine listings that are comprised of organic and inorganic. Organic listings refer to how a website ranks without the help of paid “keywords,” such as Google AdSense, and inorganic are paid listings. While inorganic listings are a quick and dirty way to get a website to rank at the top of a page, it is not the best long-term strategy as it can be costly and is not as effective as natural search results.
However, the problem is there is so much competition between similar websites that getting a site to rank high in the listings naturally is not always easy and typically requires a good deal of experience and technical expertise. This is where using an SEO agency can help your business increase organic traffic and generate leads.
On-Site SEO
Also referred to as on-page SEO, on-site optimization is the creation and organization of elements on a web page in such a way that the search engine algorithms view the page more favorably than the pages of your competitor’s websites. While many people are confused by the word, an algorithm is nothing more than the code the programmer uses to tell a computer what to do. The ultimate goal of on-site optimization is to make it as easy as possible for the search engines to match the page content to what the users searched for. This requires the search-engine algorithm to determine how relevant the page content is to the keywords used in the search term.
Pages are best optimized using the page’s content and its HTML source code so the search engines will properly interpret web page content to provide users with a clear understanding of what a page is about and how it relates to their search query.
Off-Site SEO
The best way to explain off-site, or off-page, search engine optimization is to think of it as a webpage’s reputation on the world wide web. Because it is most often incorrectly referred to as the “internet,” most people don’t think of the worldwide collection of websites as a “web.”
However, this is how the search engine algorithms file and rank every website that is published online. One of the most effective ways of increasing your site’s online reputation is through its association with other websites. Highly reputable websites usually rank at the top of the search results because of the site’s “EAT,” standing for Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness, score. The best way to increase your site’s EAT is for it to have multiple links to and from other high-ranking websites as well as positive reviews and recommendations. A B2B SEO agency can help your site establish a higher EAT.
Technical SEO
The goal of all search engines is to present the best possible results in response to the search terms the user enters. To do this, robots called spiders constantly crawl the web to read pages to keep the search listings as up-to-date and relevant as possible. One factor that determines a page’s rank is how well the spiders can understand what the page is about based on the data that is presented on the page. The better the data is structured, the better the spiders are able to categorize it and report the data to the search algorithm. By improving the technical aspects of your site, you help the spiders do a better job at categorizing the data. These technical aspects can be something as simple as a dash where there should be a slash in the HTML code.
Conclusion
A properly optimized webpage is designed to get search algorithms to recognize the page is what the user is looking for from the search term, or terms, that were entered. Because there are so many websites that contain similar content, getting a webpage to constantly rank high in the listing is about a lot more than just providing quality content and using good keywords. In order to get the best results from search engines, your site must be properly constructed and optimized to meet all the criteria search engine algorithms look for.
