You’ve probably already heard about SEO and SEM. Even though they sound similar, they are not. SEM stands for Search Engine Marketing. In short, SEM means paying for ads, in order for your website to show up (higher) in paid search results. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. Similarly but different, SEO means making some changes to your website so that it will naturally show up in people’s search results, also known as organic search results. This last option is free.
Why is SEO important?
Imagine you’re searching for a new pair of sneakers, would you click on the second, third, or even fourth page? 95% of searchers would not click further than the first page of the search results. Therefore, it’s super important that your website is attractive enough to be on the first page or close to that.
How does SEO work?
Let’s take Google as an example. Google crawls the internet to collect as much as information about websites and all of their pages as possible. All these pages are collected in an index and sorted by different characteristics such as content and topic. Whenever someone searches something, an algorithm determines what the searcher is looking for and shows the most relevant pages from the index.
How do you use SEO?
In general, a search result consists of 3 parts: the (clickable) title, the URL, and the description. Searchers will see this information and Search Engines will use this information like a code. Therefore, it’s important to appeal to both searchers and search engines. Here are some tips:
- Create clear titles and descriptions that are relevant to the page. Furthermore, make sure that each title and description of a page is unique.
- Optimize your title tags and meta descriptions.
- Choose a domain name and subpages that are short, easy to read, and descriptive.
- Create useful content that is worth it to be shared through blogs, e-mails, social media, etc.
- Learn about what your customers are actually searching for and with which words they do this. Also look into which words people use when they’re talking about a business like yours. These are your most important keywords!
- Make sure to include your most important keywords on every page.
- Add a short caption to each image and make sure they have a clear name.
- Organize your website in categories. This makes it easier for search engines to crawl your website.
- Divide content within a page in easy to understand chunks. You can do this by using headers.
- Make sure to regularly add new content to attract new visitors to your website.
