Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the art and science of getting a website to appear at the top of organic search engine results.
When your target market searches Google or Bing (or any other search engine) for something you have to offer, it’s important that they find your website, not a competitor’s website.
External authority building
Eventually, all the rivers of SEO flow to this one place: authority building. Building your authority largely involves link building. Links are always a crucial part of building strong organic rankings; however, links can be the hardest part of SEO.
Here it is very important to define your linking philosophy before you start, because it can really make or break your link building efforts. Although link building is a deep topic that we cannot cover in depth here, if you can at least develop a positive link building philosophy, you are already ahead of most of your competition.
The 4 pillars of SEO
Let’s break down SEO into its most relevant parts: the 4 pillars of SEO. To create a strong website that ranks well and is durable, you’ll need to make sure the foundation is laid from the start. To do this, Clear Door SEO believes (and we practice) that the 4 pillars of SEO are:
- Technical SEO: Is- This is The part of SEO that focuses on website and server optimization to make it easier for search engines to crawl and index website pages.
- Content writing: Content is used throughout the website to provide information to the reader. It helps describe the purpose and intent of the website. Content is what is SEO optimized to rank in search engines. While this is point number two, make no mistake: content is still king!
- Onsite SEO: Onsite SEO or Onpage SEO are the processes used to optimize user-facing elements on a website. These processes typically include optimizing things like meta descriptions, title tags, interlinking, and keyword usage.
- Off-site SEO: Off-page SEO or off-site SEO is the process carried out to optimize elements that are not on the actual website. Also, these are usually components that include building backlinks, citations (great for local SEO), social shares, and reviews for your website. All of these send positive signals to search engines about a website’s content, credibility, and authority.
Technical SEO
This is more computer generated SEO, which is made up of very calculated steps.
This is important, but overdoing it can reduce the creativity of the content and make it a bit technical.
Mobile friendliness
Mobile friendliness is something that no one can ignore. Especially since Google, the world’s largest search engine, uses mobile-first indexing. This means that Google uses the mobile version of the website to index and rank it (the very “important” part).
One thing that helps tremendously is having a responsive website design, this ensures that the website looks the way it should no matter if you are on a tablet, desktop or phone.