When you conduct search engine optimization techniques, it may seem like you can dust off your hands and wait for the results to roll in. However, that would be a mistake. SEO is definitely not a one-time thing. There are many different SEO techniques, almost all of which must be executed regularly for continued organic growth. Knowing how SEO works and the techniques there are to optimize your website for search engines will help you know how and when you need to tweak your efforts. So is SEO a one time thing? Let’s dive in.
What is SEO?
Search engine optimization is a broad collection of techniques and strategies to show search engines that your website is authoritative content and good quality. Think of it as courting search engines. You’re proving your website’s worth, and you need to be consistent and persistent to show the search engines you’re not all talk.
These techniques help you gain visibility and market share, in addition to helping your website climb to the top of the search engine results pages, or SERPs. This is a set of techniques for organic search, in contrast to paid search options like pay-per-click advertising.
Why is SEO important?
Crafting your website so it ranks well on search engines is crucial because so many people who want to purchase something start with a Google search. According to Statista, more than 85 percent of people use Google to search the internet as of March 2023. People use search engines to research their problems, possible solutions, and the brands that can provide them.
How do search engines rank websites?
Title tags, keywords, picture alt text, the structure of internal links, and inbound links (also known as backlinks) are all factors that search engines consider. When deciding where your site belongs, search engines consider more than just on-site content and code. Search engines like Google, Duck Duck Go, and Bing use web crawlers to look at all of this information when indexing your website.
Search engines take into account two criteria to provide consumers with relevant results:
- Correspondence between a user’s search terms and the information that is shown on a page. Search engines evaluate content based on various criteria, including subject and keywords.
- A website’s authority may be gauged by its popularity among Internet users. Google believes that a page’s or resource’s popularity indicates that its material is of high quality.
Search algorithms are complicated equations used for this analysis. The search engines’ algorithms are closely guarded secrets. Over time, though, SEOs have uncovered a number of the criteria that go into a page’s final rating. They are the focus of an SEO strategy and are known as ranking factors.
How long does SEO take to work?
SEO is a complex and ever-evolving process, but the average time to see results is between four and twelve months. Google’s crawling and indexing algorithm, as well as other search engine features, get regular updates.
While this improves the user experience by thwarting deceptive websites’ attempts to boost their rankings via keyword stuffing artificially, it slows down the process of working your way to the top of search engine results pages. Competition, keywords, content, and front- and back-end SEO work all affect how well your site ranks.
How Often Should You Update Your SEO?
The rule of thumb is that you should update your SEO every three months. However, you must adjust accordingly every time an algorithm update is announced. Your competition will be making tweaks to their content and website based on what guidelines Google and other search engines release.
Short-Term Vs. Long-Term SEO
As Google’s SEO starter guide states, the best way to optimize your website is to ensure it includes relevant and compelling content. Consumers may read your interesting and helpful blog posts, social media updates, email newsletters, and other content in various ways. Google says you may boost organic traffic to your website by being transparent with your audience and giving them relevant, engaging content.
This plan is more of a long-term investment with no upfront costs. If you optimize your site properly, you may get free, high rankings in search engines. This will ensure that many of your target audience come across your website.
The greater your website’s visibility, the higher the percentage of visitors who become paying clients.
Therefore, before writing a new article or blog post, you should investigate the relevant keywords and apply them to please the search engines.
But that’s just not enough. In actuality, though, the most popular keywords are always evolving. As newer, more relevant keywords emerge, the older ones die out. This means you should periodically review your previous articles and assess how effectively you used keywords.
Remember that Google no longer focuses only on the number of keywords, so trying to trick the search engine into ranking your site by loading it with irrelevant keywords won’t work. Even crawl bots have caught on to the fact that excellent content is more essential than keywords.
SEO Techniques
EAT
Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness, or E.A.T. – This information is sourced from Google’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines, a 168-page document used by human quality raters to evaluate the relevance and accuracy of Google’s search results. Google first released this paper online in 2013 to help webmasters better understand what Google looks for in a web page.
Expertise
To be considered an expert in a topic requires extensive experience and study in that discipline. It is rated mostly based on its substance and not its presentation or structure. Google values material produced by a recognized authority in a certain field. This pertains to the author’s credentials, experience, and training in relation to issues affecting your money or your life.
Authority
Being authoritative means having a solid reputation, especially amongst other professionals and decision-makers in your field. Simply said, authority is achieved when others consider one the definitive source on a certain issue.
Raters look up information about the website or person’s reputation online to determine its authority.
Trustworthiness
Reliability refers to the website’s and its content’s veracity, openness, and precision.
Trustworthiness is determined by various factors, one of which is whether or not the website makes clear who is accountable for any posted information.
It’s also crucial, particularly for crucial issues and e-commerce sites, to have enough contact information.
On-Page SEO
Optimizations made directly to individual web pages constitute what is known as “on-site SEO” or “on-page SEO.” One way to do this is to ensure the page’s content is clear and useful to the reader. With on-page SEO, you want to convey to search engines the value your site offers potential visitors.
In addition to the content, the URL structure, mobile friendliness, loading speed, and metadata are also factors in on-page SEO.
Metadata includes your meta descriptions, page titles, and much more.
People’s “to click or not to click” decisions are based almost entirely on the meta descriptions they read on search engines. Headers are the HTML components that visually “catch the eye” and should be tweaked in accordance with search engine ranking patterns.
Before selecting the tags or composing the headers, you should investigate your subject’s most common terms and phrases, just like you did with the keywords.
Title tags, for instance, should typically not exceed 55 or 60 characters. Long, in-depth articles with embedded videos and other materials are another industry norm. Occasionally, you may update your earlier articles by adding fresh media like infographics and videos.
Since titles, header tags, and other HTML components are strongly tied to keywords, it is important to reassess your content strategy after updating your keyword approach.
When Google or other important search engines change their ranking algorithms, reviewing your website’s SEO strategy and making any necessary adjustments to the descriptions, titles, and headers is critical.
Off-Page SEO
Off-page SEO, or “off-site optimization,” refers to the steps you take to improve your website’s rankings that don’t really take place on your website. Off-page SEO, therefore, refers to any measures used to increase traffic to the site outside of its own pages. Regarding off-page SEO optimization, link building is the most effective strategy. Three distinct types of inbound connections exist:
- When other websites connect to yours naturally, it helps boost your rankings.
- Links that are manually added when another website is linked to yours
- Links that you’ve made yourself, such as in an email signature, a news release, or any other kind of self-promotion
Technical SEO
To improve organic search engine rankings, technical SEO ensures a website conforms to the current technical criteria of major search engines. Important parts of technical SEO include the website’s architecture, crawling, indexing, and rendering.
A well-organized site map is the most critical technical SEO factor. You need a “flat” site where every page is directly linked to every other page. This way, search engine crawlers may more easily access your site from beginning to finish.
Conclusion
is SEO a one time thing? No. It is time-consuming and takes a while to work. However, regular updates to your SEO can be a powerful tool!
