Have you ever searched for something that you wanted to buy so badly? What was the first thing you did? Did you go search a newspaper, magazine or book to find out more about it? Or did you go online and type in the name of the item on a search engine like Google?
If I was to make a guess, it is very like that you chose option number two. Then like magic, you will wait for the results to appear in mere seconds. It is also very likely that you only searched the results on the first page and maybe the second page but rarely beyond that.
Now, if you are a business owner with an ecommerce website, you definitely know that you need to get your website listed on page 1 of a search engine like Google to drive in more leads and ultimately sales. So how do you get your website listed there?
There’s where search engine optimization or SEO for short comes in. SEO involves getting your website ranked for certain keywords on page 1 on a search engine like Google. Since most search engines usually list about 10 results per page, this means you need to get your website on the top 10 listings of search engines if you ever want your business to get tons of traffic and be more successful.
So how then does SEO works? The basic premise of SEO involves two components: on-site SEO and off-site SEO. These two components, when done right, will propel your website to the top pages of search engines.
What is on-site SEO? On-site, or sometimes known as on-page, SEO involves optimizing different components of your website that will ultimately determine how it ranks in search engine rankings for particular keywords. Since these components are found within your website, you have direct and complete control over them and can maximize them fully.
Some of these components include page titles, headings, URL, alternate text for images, page load speed, content and internal links. As much as possible, you should include your targeted keywords in the website’s page titles, headings, URL and alternate text for images. The page load speed will determine how fast your website loads and of course, the faster it loads, the better. As for the content that you put up on your website, it has to be relevant and useful to people or else it will not add any value to them. Last but not least, you should try to include internal links to other relevant pages within your website to fully optimize it.
Next, let’s talk about off-site SEO. Off-Site SEO involves performing certain tasks outside the boundaries of your website to ultimately drive your website to higher page ranks in the search engine result pages (SERPs). The main purpose for doing off-site SEO is to improve the authority, credibility and relevance of your website through building backlinks from other websites with high authority and organic traffic. The ultimate aim is of course to get your website recognized by search engines and thus get high page ranks in SERPs.
There are good ways (white hat) and bad ways (black hat) of doing off-site SEO but if you want to avoid getting banned by search engines, it is highly recommended that you stick to white hat methods when dealing with off-site SEO. The most popular techniques of doing white hat offsite SEO are by link building, content marketing and social media marketing. Even then, there are certain proper ways of doing them. These include, but not limited to, putting up relevant content that people will want to link to, getting social media shares of great content that build links to your website, sending outreach emails to popular experts in your niche that are willing to link back to your website and putting up guest posts on blogs that are related to your niche which include back links to your website.
And there you have it, everything you need to know about SEO. If you will like to get started on SEO for your website, look no further than our team of experts from NightOwl, one of the best Singapore SEO Company.