What the Heck is SEO?

If you’ve ever built a website with us or plan to, you’ll hear the term SEO a lot. SEO is necessary for making a website successful because, without it, almost no one will be able to find you. We get a lot of questions about SEO so we are addressing some of the most frequent ones here to help you really understand what we’re talking about. 

Q: What is SEO?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It is a strategy used to help your website rank on search results pages on search engines (like Google or Bing) with the goal always to rank high enough to be on the first page. With a higher ranking comes more organic (unpaid) impressions on and visitors to your site.

Q: How does SEO work?

In all honesty, the only people who really know how SEO works are the people that design the search engines. SEO is based on complex algorithms that aren’t shared with the general public. However, we have been able to crack some of the code and discover a few secrets that contribute to good SEO. Things like keywords and phrases and mobile responsiveness have been proven to positively contribute to SEO.

Q: What are keywords?

Keywords and keyphrases are short, simple terms potential customers might type into a search bar. They should summarize your services and organization. Keywords and phrases are specific to your industry but broad enough people will actually search them. For example, if you run an antique store in Perryville, Missouri, one of your keyphrases should be “Antique Store in Perryville Missouri.” 

*Important: you don’t want the name of your company to be a keyphrase for your website because it will already be the title of your site and therefore searchable.   

Q: What makes my website fully optimized?

Like we said earlier, the real formula to full optimization is kept a secret from the general public, but we’ve been able to find a few answers to that question with a lot of testing. One of the key things to remember is, search engines want to make money so they want to provide their customers with the best websites and content available in order to maintain their trust. Here’s what we know makes your website optimized:

• Keywords and keyphrases: These help because they make your website searchable. Keywords and phrases are assigned to specific pages of  your website where they are included in the written content, image alt-text (description that appears behind an image), meta description (the summary that appears on a search result page) and slug (the part of a page’s URL that defines what the page is about). 
• Easy navigation: Search engines “crawl” websites to get information about them  in order to produce their results. If your website has complicated navigation (too many pages, too many deadlinks, a website that isn’t mobile-friendly, etc.) search engines will have a hard time crawling them and could give you poor results. 
• Updated content: By updating your website regularly, you score well for SEO. By posting blogs or simply restructuring or rewording old content, you’ll demonstrate to search engines that your website is active and up-to-date. Again, search engines want to provide the best information to their customers and that involves showing them sites with updated information. 
• Beautiful design: If your website is well-designed, you’ll catch the attention of more visitors who stumble upon it. The more attention you attract, the more time people will spend on your site. This is important to search engines. Click-throughs on your site tell search engines that people see you as an authority in whatever industry you serve. Because you have a good site, search engines will view yours as one of the best and provide that as a top result.

Q: What does Rooted Web do for my SEO strategy?

Rooted Web’s content and SEO specialists are the experts in making sure your website is optimized for the best results. We start by creating beautiful websites that are easy to navigate and mobile-friendly. From there, with your help, we establish a list of keyphrases for each page that define your business and services. We apply these to elements on the backend of your site to make sure they’re able to be seen by the creepy crawlers of search engines. We also verify that each keyphrase is something people are actually searching for and how often. 

SEO is a complicated process made easy by trusting Rooted Web. We take the heavy lifting and guesswork out of website design, development and optimization so you can focus on running your business. Your website is in good hands with the Rooted Web team. For more information about how we can help you, contact us today.