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The New SEO in 2024

You finally have your social media and online presence up and running for your small business. All of the print advertising, including business cards, has the website address listed and the Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter logos.

The final step is to wait for the visitors to start logging on and racking up the sales or sales leads. As time passes by and the company’s social media efforts seem to be lacking when it comes to generating the sales or the leads that were hoped for, thoughts start to emerge that something must be missing.

What’s likely missing is that the copy on the website, blogs, and other social media outlets are lost to the world because it can’t be found by the search engines such as Google and Yahoo.

According to www.bluecorona.com (an inbound web marketing, analytics, and optimization company), “93 percent of online experiences begin with a search engine and 47 percent of people click on one of the first three listings.” Such research results make it vitally important to make all online content search engines optimized (SEO).

Making content SEO is one of the most important steps in getting the website found online. This step can be a bit time-consuming at first, but it is well worth the effort to make all the pages on a website, blog, or other social media outlet SEO.  The return on investment is that more readers and visitors will be drawn to the site.

What is SEO?

SEO is a way to write content on a website or blog using several techniques to help get the site found by the all-important search engines. It is meant to up the ante on a website by getting its ranking up in search engine results.

The ranking determines where a website’s URL would fall amongst the hundreds or thousands of web addresses on the search results list. We’ve all seen those long lists of websites that come up with the simplest of searches online. Companies want to be as close to the top of that list as possible, and that is most often achieved through implementing SEO techniques.

Keywords Make Online SEO-Friendly

A website has to be relevant, appealing, easy to use, and to follow for all visitors. It has to also have the same elements for search engines. To make a site optimized, meaningful, and easy to find when searching with Google, Yahoo, and other search engines, it has to be designed, written, and coded in a certain way using something called keywords.

Keywords are the heart and soul of SEO. Website designers and writers determine the keywords used by a company’s target audience to find something on the internet. These are the words people type in the search box of the search engine when they search for something.

A good example is a company selling specially designed diabetic shoes. To get to the top of the search results list, the site must include keywords that users would use in a search. One way to find this out is to use a keyword search tool such as https://keywordtool.io/. Users click on the appropriate search engine tab and then type in the word or phrase that you need to find keywords for and that people have used in that search engine.

When typing “diabetic shoes” into the Google search engine, it returns “diabetic shoes for women” or “diabetic shoes for men”. The website for the company selling specially designed diabetic shoes would want to write those search phrases into the content written for the site or a blog.

There are several resources available to help one learn SEO and using keywords including The Yahoo! Style Guide.  For more resources, you know the drill, type “learning SEO” into the search engine box of Google or Yahoo!.

Must-Do Tips in 2024 to Get Started with SEO 

While using keywords is important to SEO, there are other techniques involved. Below are a few things to keep in mind when getting started with SEO, including:

  • When designing an online presence, always keep readers’ and visitors’ needs at the center of the design and the writing. Make websites and blogs relevant to visitors, and provide value to the readers. Using only promotional language and posts may turn away people if they don’t find something that means something to them on the site. Research, statistics, customer feedback, articles, and other content is often more important than promotional information.
  • All the pages on a website or blog should be search engine optimized with keywords for relevance. Make each page unique with titles and topics and each page uses keywords relevant to the topic of each page.
  • Only use keywords that apply to the website or the blog. The keywords should blend into the content easily versus being made up or made to fit. Readers and visitors will know if they are being misled by keywords that don’t belong.
  • Clear, concise, and high-quality writing for websites and blogs is vital to the success of any online presence. That writing should be able to fit the keywords in where they belong and use them the way they should be used.
  • Plan out the links used on the website because they are also important to websites and blogs and become part of the search engine optimization ranking. Links to other company web pages or other company’s websites are important to get sites optimized.

Pay for the Total Package

Companies pay hundreds or thousands of dollars to web designers and writers to get the best and the most high-tech sites that have videos, photos, music, special graphics, and the most appealing layouts. None of that matters if people can’t find the site or the blog through an online search.

Success online is driven by getting found by search engines. Getting found means making sure digital resources are designed for search engine optimization. Before signing the bottom line for that beautifully designed and wonderfully written website, make sure the price includes SEO.