What search engine optimization (SEO) is and a simple guide how to use it!

Let’s talk about google. Why do people google things? The reason why most people google something is because they have a question and looking for an answer. If your business have the solution of that problem the person are searching for it will show up on google. The problem is that your business may show up at the fifth page on google. To be brutally honest with you your website is dead if it doesn’t show up at the first page because almost no one even press page two on google.

Now how do we solve this problem? This is always going to be really hard because the websites with most traffic automatically ranks higher but there is some small tricks you can do to help your website rank higher. Have you ever heard of the three letters SEO before? SEO stand for “Search engine optimization” and is what you need to do on your website to rank higher. Google for an example is a search engine and you need to optimize your website with keywords in different ways to explain to google what your website is all about which leads to your website having a bigger chance of ranking  higher. Got it? 

How do you do that and where do you even start? There is a lot of different ways of doing this. First of all it’s going to be much easier to optimize a website you can code yourself because that give you the full access to the hole website. Unfortunately not all of us can code and we don’t have a big team coding for us. This is where websites like WordPress come in to the picture. There are a lot of different websites that help you create your own website these days and it’s sometimes hard to decide which you going to choose. I recommend you choosing one where the feature of coding yourself is available if you want to hire someone to do it for you in the future. 

To explain SEO as simple as I can it’s really about keywords to describe your site to the search engine. First lets talk about optimizing titles. Most of the search engines only display the first sixty to seventy characters so I would recommend you to do shorter titles with your keywords in the beginning. Right now in 2020 I would not write a title longer than sixty characters to optimize for a good title. If you create a longer title a search engine like google will replace the last words in your title with dots. It looks something like this “How to use search engine optimization | Rank higher on google when..." and you don’t want that. 

Your titles should always be different. You got a lot of titles on one website so make every title unique and customize them to reflect the content on the specific page. Never use too many keywords in a title either. Google doesn’t like when you spam keywords. They might even rewrite your title in worst cases. On some websites and if you code your website yourself you can add meta titles and descriptions to write an alternative title. If you add these google may sometime even switch and display the meta title instead. Just focusing on writing unique useful titles that describe the page and you should be fine.

Now when you know how to write a title. What keywords should you put in your title? Always remember to not take a battle you can’t win. Don’t use a title you know millions of companies like you already have. Be unique and try to find a battle you have a chance in.

Is there only the text on your website you can optimize to rank higher? No it’s actually not. A small trick a lot of people miss out on is to name every picture on the website to describe what is shown in the picture. Instead of keeping your photo with a name like “89293.png” you should name it to something like “man-holding-a-smartphone.png”. Maybe a bad example but you get the point. When doing this you let the search engines know what your photos are about as well. Always remember the search engines don’t have eyes so you always going to have to describe everything on your page as much as you can. If you do all these small SEO tricks you will help your website rank higher. You maybe not ranking number one with all the competition out on the internet but at least you are giving yourself a chance to rank the first page. 

There are so many small tricks you can do with search engine optimization but in this blog post I just wanted to introduce all of you to the concept and give you a few very important facts to get started. You can always use a search engine like google to find out more if you are interested ;)