Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Your Website Matters

Modern search engines are smarter than you might think they are. A search engine uses focused algorithms to find the best search results for the user’s search query. These algorithms are constantly changing and updating but their entire purpose is to match people with pages. Although search engines process massive amounts of data in their algorithms. Search engines look at key elements when determining a website’s value and where it should show up in the search results. SEO is all about keeping up with what those elements are and putting practices into place to best accommodate them.

Great Writing

One of those best practices is great writing. Quality content is the first step to improving your SEO. Search engines can match the content to searches, recognize the quality of your page due to excellent grammar and spelling, and then people will stay on the page once they get to it. SEO aside, you’d be surprised how much legitimacy you could lose over a typo or embarrassing grammatical error.

SEO should be a holistic process. Many factors—like load times on websites and the quality of your code markup and content—affect your SEO. The concept of SEO is two-pronged: on-site SEO and off-site SEO. To build your approach, you need to include both.

On-site SEO

Generally, on-site SEO is relying solely on your webpage's content to capture the attention of search engines. To take advantage of the benefits tweaking your SEO can provide, you’ll need a firm understanding of on-site SEO practices. These include implementing a solid technology infrastructure and using modern document structure to create compelling content that will not only draw people in, but the content will also make them want to stick around.

Off-site SEO

Off-site SEO is probably the more familiar SEO approach. This is the practice of including links from other high-value websites on your own. These links need to be contextual and carefully placed by hand.

As these links accumulate, search engines see your website as an authority on whatever subject those links refer to. The search engines’ logic is that if people are talking about and pointing to your website, you’re doing something worthwhile.

More inbound links = more activity = more authority = higher relevancy.

When you come to Plan Left, you’ll notice we prefer the term “search engine relevancy.” This is the core focus of what SEO is meant to achieve. When building a website’s search engine relevancy, you need a solid foundation. Much like a good recipe needs a base, your SEO needs a solid website. Let Plan Left help you create a plan of action by first taking inventory of your current assets and their value, assessing business objectives, and building a marketing strategy to achieve your goals. Get started with a free consultation to start building your strategy.