What is SEO and How Does It Improve My Website’s Ranking?

SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimization.” It is the process of getting traffic from “organic” or “natural” search results on search engines. To put it simply, SEO is the art of improving your website’s ranking; that is, how it appears in the top results of search engines like Google, Bing, or Yahoo, for example.

SEO is divided into 2 fundamental concepts, the combination of which is the magic formula for improving your website’s ranking. We are talking about On-site SEO + Off-site SEO = SEO.

On-site SEO

This concept refers to the aspects that you can directly modify on your website. It includes all optimizations that depend solely on you and not on a third party.

What does On-site SEO involve? In summary:

• Making it easier and faster for Google to index your website.
• Identifying each page as relevant to a search query or keyword.
• Helping visitors and search engines better understand your content.

This is achieved by optimizing both the content and the HTML source code of a page. Beyond the keywords (topics) used in a web page’s content and how they are analyzed, there are several elements that can influence the On-site optimization of a page:

• Content quality.

Focus on titles, descriptions, and images.

Use representative keywords in your title.

Include impactful and meaningful images.

• Use of links on a page.

Include internal and external links related to your page that already have a certain authority.

• Page load speed.

Use Google’s “PageSpeed Insights” tool to check your page speed and prioritize improvements.

• Use of structured data (Schema.org or other markup).
• Page URL structure.

Use descriptive and direct URLs.

• Responsiveness for mobile devices.
• Page metadata.
• Use of an SSL certificate, which will add legitimacy to your page and boost its search results.

As you can see, On-site SEO has less and less to do with the repetition or placement of keywords and more to do with understanding who your users are, what they are looking for, and which pages can provide the content that best meets that need. What is important is the relevance of the user experience.

On-site SEO is essential, but by itself, it does not guarantee good ranking, especially when competing in competitive niches. And that’s where Off-site SEO comes in, which will help you gain authority and rise in search results.

Off-site SEO

Here begins the other twin part to improve your SEO, Off-site SEO. This refers to external positioning factors; that is, what you cannot directly manage from your website. It involves improving the user’s perception of a site’s popularity, relevance, reliability, and authority through:

• Building backlinks – links from other pages to yours.
• Social media marketing.
• Guest blogging.
• Linked and unlinked brand mentions.
• Influencer marketing.

The goal of each of these activities is to somehow create a reference to your site from anywhere else on the web. This happens by obtaining links from other sites (especially those with a good reputation), brand mentions, content actions, and “trust votes” from sources outside your own website. Some techniques for working on Off-site SEO include:

• Maintaining an updated blog with quality content.
• Inviting a qualified person to develop special content for your blog (Guest blogging).
• Using social media more efficiently.
• Link Building.
• Posting meaningful comments on blogs and forums on the web.
• It is also possible to pay for links, but this is a discouraged practice.

It is very important to be aware that neither of the two is more important than the other. It is the combination and best optimization of both that will allow you to improve your website’s ranking.

Now that you have the basics of SEO, use the Woorank tool to check your current SEO score and find specific information on what you need to improve on your website.