What is SEO or search engine optimization?

SEO refers to the work you can do to make your website easier for people to find online, when someone types in a certain term or phrase into a search engine we call them keywords or key phrases they get back a long list of results; thousands in fact.

So what happens when a website shows up on page 30, well when’s the last time you clicked on page 30, or even page 10; what about page 3 most people are like you, they hardly ever click past page 1.

Most of the time they don’t find what they’re looking for, they just start from scratch with new search, rather than clicking through endless result pages; that’s why it’s so important to make sure you appear toward the top of the list.

Now on the search results page people can click on two types of links paid ads and organic results, paid ads are just what they sound like, results that a company has paid Google to appear when a particular keyword or phrase has been searched; organic results on the other hand show up naturally based on their relevance to the keyword or phrase that was searched.

If you’re curious which of these most people click on, it’s not even close organic wins 94% of the time, not only that 7 out of 10 people will click on one of the first seven results; this means you should really care about your ranking on organic search results that’s a Ton of extremely targeted relevant traffic you could be getting to your site based on the keywords you shoots. All potential customers, reader, subscribers; you name it coming to you, this is why SEO matters.

Google and all other major search engines for that matter has created an extremely sophisticated formula to determine where on the search results page your site appears and you want to do everything you can to boost that ranking, there’s number of ways you can do this.

I’ll quickly go over 5 SEO techniques you can use to improve your search ranking

Let’s talk about keywords, First SEO used to be pretty straightforward you’d simply pick a keyword you wanted your site to rank high for chuck it in to all the content of your site and watch your position on search results skyrocket, the more the keyword appeared on your site the higher your page ranked, nowadays using keywords appropriately is less about frequency and much more about relevancy while you still want to include keywords throughout your site it’s more important to utilize them with relevant content, high quality articles, posts and pages that are useful and legitimate add value for your visitors and speak volumes about your website, so don’t worry so much about gaming some formula based on keywords; focus on making your content match the needs of your customers instead.

Second critically important step for boosting SEO is to gather inbound links and back links, back-link is a fancy word for links to your site that originate from another source these links from other websites to yours. Backlinks can come from anything from news articles to social media posts, but keep in mind the quality of your link source matters the more influential or legitimate the website is that links back to yours the more positive effect that backlink will have on your overall search result ranking.

Third is your site security when someone makes a purchase on your website they shouldn’t have to worry about their identity being stolen or credit cards being compromised people don’t like using websites that aren’t safe to use and neither does Google to optimize your position on search results consider installing an SSL certificate, it works to encrypt ant data communicated between your website and visitors so things like usernames, passwords and credit card information are protected.

Now lets see couple of points about social media, because your social influence matters too, one out of every four people in the entire world are using social media; that’s over two billion people just like with backlinks sites that are more popular and relevant on social media are given more credibility and therefore higher rankings so whether you’re brands tweets are being retweeted by the President or your posts are shared by a lot of average people; search engines will take notice and boost your site’s ranking.

Finally and very importantly is to ensure your website displays well on mobile devices heard of mobilegeddon, it’s the term web developers coined for the day when mobile friendliness became a critical factor in Google’s search engine algorithm and there’s good reason for that change, there are over 1 point 9 billion smartphone users worldwide and retail sales are made on mobile devices is expected to reach 400 billion dollars by 2019 and get this 29 percent of all search queries are made on you got mobile devices long story short as of April 21st 2015, Google expects your site to be as easy to use on a phone as it is on a computer the easiest way to do this is to make your site responsive; meaning it adjusts to fit any size screen automatically this is a big seal you could build an amazing website and still have it ranked lower on search results compared to your competition if your’e not making it easy for smartphone users to navigate.

Good SEO doesn’t happen overnight it takes time but the sooner you’ll start the sooner climbing up the results ladder and as long as you have your domain name you can start your SEO efforts even before your website is finished.