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SEO Basics: The Solo Entrepreneur’s Guide

SEO Basics: The Solo Entrepreneur’s Guide

Search engine visibility is crucial to keeping your small business afloat. When your business’s website has a good online presence, it’ll gain more engagement—and more customers as a result. However, with so many businesses competing for a spot on a search engine’s top search results, ensuring that your website ranks high on a user’s search list is tough. Without enough knowledge of how search engines choose the best websites for a user’s query, yours can can get buried in the vast expanse of the internet. 

It’s also a good idea to hire a company that offers quality SEO services. They can help raise the rank of your website and boost its credibility. Even if you’re a solo entrepreneur, there’s no harm in working with SEO companies. Because, they have the right tools and resources to fine-tune your website. It also helps, however, to learn a little more about SEO on your own. When you have a good grasp of what SEO is and how it works, it’ll be easier to find an SEO company that understands your needs. You also won’t feel lost when discussing your plans with an SEO specialist because you’ll be more knowledgeable about the basics.

Learning SEO may be overwhelming at the start. But if you can get the basics down, it’ll be easier to broaden your knowledge. Not only that, you can also keep up with your SEO partner. Here’s a short guide on what a solo entrepreneur like yourself should learn about SEO.

Understanding What SEO Is Really About

Before getting into the nitty-gritty of SEO with your chosen specialist, you need to know what it is and what it’s meant to do. SEO stands for “search engine optimization,” and to put things simply, it’s a set of methods used to get a website and its web pages to rank higher in search engines. The higher the rank, the more discoverable the website gets. And when the website is more visible in the search list, the more likely people are to click on it and increase its web traffic.

SEO has three major areas: on-page SEO, off-page SEO, and technical SEO. On-page SEO deals with whatever is on your web pages such as your blogs, product copies, and web copies. Off-page SEO focuses more on the improvements that can be done outside of the website. These include guest posting, social media strategies, and quality backlinks. Lastly, technical SEO handles the technical aspects of the website such as its performance, crawlability, and indexation. Each of these areas needs to be to optimized to ensure that your business website can reach a higher rank.

Familiarizing Yourself with the Most Important SEO Terms

There are a lot of terminologies to describe certain aspects of SEO, and newcomers may be easily overwhelmed by the sheer number of terms they have to learn. You don’t necessarily have to memorize all of them, but you do need to familiarize yourself with the essential ones to understand their importance. 

Here are a few of themsome of which you may have encountered before reading this article:

  • Traffic.In SEO, traffic pertains to the number of users visiting a website over a given time period. The higher the traffic, the better your website gets. However, you have to make sure that the users visiting your website are organic, meaning that they represent real people. Traffic that’s considered inorganic is paid, and although this generates quicker results, its effects don’t last long. Building organic traffic takes time, but the results are longer-lasting and highly valued.
  • Crawling. For search engines to discover websites that match a user’s query, they send bots (sometimes called spiders) throughout the entire internet to crawl for new and updated content. This process is called crawling, and it’s used by search engines to gather information on websites. It’s important to make your business website crawlable so it can be properly indexed.
  • Indexing. When a website is indexed, it basically means that its contents have been collected, organized, processed, and stored in the search engine’s database. This way, when a user searches for something, search engines can retrieve the list of websites that match the user’s query faster.
  • Anchor text. Anchor texts are the words or phrases that are attached to a hyperlink. The texts usually appear in blue and are underlined. When clicked, the anchor texts send the user to the website that they’re attached to.
  • Keywords. These are words and phrases that are frequently used by people when they’re searching for things on the internet. The better the integration of keywords in your business website, the likelier it will be for your website to come out on a search result. 

Experimenting with Free SEO Tools

SEO tools will help you uncover the causes that are preventing your business website from ranking up. Each tool has a specific purpose, and many of them let you try their features for free. You can use an SEO tool that provides you with detailed SEO data. Some examples are the number of site visits, location demographics, and traffic sources. You can also find tools that can crawl your website and spot errors.

The great thing about these free SEO tools is that you can use them to experiment on your website without worrying about the cost. This way, you’ll be able to envision how SEO works. However, since these sources are free, they might limit your use. If you want to get the full range of benefits from such SEO tools, it’s in your best interest to work with an SEO company that knows how to use them. Trusted SEO companies pay premiums to use all the features of the best SEO tools. Rest assured that the data they’re collecting is more precise.

See Also

Staying Up-To-Date with Search Engine Updates

Search engines are designed to improve the relevancy and quality of their search results. This is so that they can roll out updates every now and then. These updates can enhance certain features of the search engine. They can also pertain to anything from improving their indexing procedures to combating spam and duplicate content. 

Usually, search engines don’t announce when their updates are implemented. It’s so tricky to know exactly when the updates are up. Fortunately, you can follow credible SEO experts who are dedicated to helping businesses stay up to date with the latest search engine updates. Their insight will be critical when it comes to implementing the new updates on your website. And, you can avoid penalties like suspension.

Getting into SEO can be difficult, especially if you’re a solo entrepreneur trying to understand the ins and outs of SEO for the first time. However, once you know the basics, it will serve you well. Among other things, you’ll be able to understand the value of working with a good SEO company and rolling out the best strategies to achieve higher rankings.

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