Source: KWFinder.com

SEO Terms you should recognize:

Trend: Search volume trend in the last 12 months Search: Average search volume from the last 12 months CPC: Average cost per click in google ads PPC: Level of competition in PPC (Pay Per Click) in Google Ads KD: Keyword difficulty. Calculated from the Link Profile Strengths (LPS) of URLs ranking in the first SERP SERP: Search Engine Results Page

SEO Image Tags

Some websites have thousands of pictures on them and behind those pictures is data that allows search engine algorithms to determine the significance of these images. When you look up images on google the only reason they populate is because they are optimized with image tags that details what the pictures consist of. You might just have these images on your website to help tell a story or it might be a product that you are trying to sell, but either way you need to have the meta data pointing in the right direction. Search engines only want to send visitors from their search engines to relevant websites. These search engines crawl websites and look for relevant content (including images) that they can direct the users of their search engine to.

There are some very helpful tools that allow people using WordPress based websites to alter the image tags on their site very easily. I will list a few below, in the order I recommend:  

Image SEO Plugins

1. Bialty
2. Update Image Tag Alt Attribute
3. Image SEO

SEO Metadata

There are multiple forms of metadata that are pertinent toward SEO strategies. Metadata allows search engines algorithm of indexing sites know what is on the website. By changing a few simple lines of code on the backend of a website you can significantly increase traffic. Below I will go over a few different types of metadata that is important to understand when growing your business on the world wide web. I will also go over some tools you can put in place to utilize metadata to your advantage.

Meta Keywords Attribute for SEO

This strategy is not of much use anymore, but I wanted to mention it because you need to fight against it in the circumstance that you hire an SEO agency professional that encourages its use. Back in the early 2000’s marketers would use this strategy to insert keywords that had nothing to do with their website just so they could draw in large amounts of traffic and boosts their DA (Domain Authority). Search engines, such as Google, are constantly changing the way they index websites to that the search engines can not be manipulated. This strategy, of course, was one that was ousted by Google years ago. The content that is on your site needs to match with keywords that are relevant to what you company does. Search engines reward sites with the possibility of web traffic based on how much value you bring to the end user with quality content.

SEO Title Tag

This metadata can have your website going 0 to 60 in less time than an F1 sports car! It is exactly how it sounds… A title tag. A title tag might be the most important in terms of metadata. You need to make sure that what you use for a title tag needs to explain exactly what your website is about in just one short sentence. You will see this tag on the top of browsers such as Firefox and sometimes on the clickable link on search engines such as google.

Meta Description Attribute

This is the information that is displayed below the title tag shown above. This meta keyword description is said to not effect the results of search engine rankings by Google. It is more used to give users of search engines a little bit of a description or what is to come when clicking the link above it. The easiest way to change the Meta Description on a WordPress website is to use the Easy WP Meta Description plugin. Makes sure when hiring a professional from seo agency to take care of these aspects of your website that these details are taken into consideration.

Meta Robots Attribute

This is giving instruction on how search engines should crawl your website. By default, this meta tag will automatically allow the search engine to index your site, but you can use this to make it to where

these search engines will not index certain pages. This can become useful when certain pages do not pertain to your end goals in terms of traffic. 

 

Backlinks

These are my favorite links. These are the links that add to the legitimacy of your site. It makes your site the real deal. Think about when you meet someone you have never met before, but they walk in with the former president of the United States. You will immediately trust and want to meet this person. This is the beauty of backlinks. Search engines think the same way as humans in this sense. They want to see that other, more “official” sites, give you the enough credit to link back to your site. We call this link juice and it directly affects your domain authority. Domain authority helps give a ranking system to evaluate how a SERP ranks a site. You can evaluate your domain authority of your website here.

SEO Services

There are many services that can help you with supplying backlinks for your site from sites such as Fiverr, but these are not all they are cracked up to be. This is because many times they make promises to supply hundred and hundreds of backlinks to your site, but the issue is that the sites they are linking to yours are normally not relevant to your website. Search engines can smell that trickery from a mile away. If you have a website and there are multiple links back to yours from political website that might not match up to your doughnut shop. This will end up doing more harm than good.

Potentially setting you back significantly in terms of domain authority, and to think… if only you knew this before trying to cheat the system! Oh yeah, you do know now! If you are looking to do a link analysis on you or your competitors backlinks you can create an account with My Site Auditor with a 10 day free trial that does not require a credit card! I love to look at whomever is doing the best in whatever industry my client is in and try to mimic their backlink strategy. The art of this is to figure out who is doing the best and who is doing nothing. From there we can copy the beauty’s and leave the ugly’s out of the equation.

How SEO Backlinks Works

Content SEO 

This is the backbone of your website. The backbone of search engines algorithm. Writing content isn’t good enough. It needs to attract the audience you are trying to reach, keep the content directly on your domain, make headlines that people “have to” read, use keywords that attract the algorithm to show users that are searching for these keywords to your site, structure the article correctly, and blast it off through all of your social media platforms! You need to make sure that this content you pump out isn’t short. Google favors content over 2,000 words. Just know that there is no going halfway when it comes to putting out content for your website! Its either all or nothing. Many business owners are scared to write because they think that they don’t know what they are doing, and I must say that I 100% agree with them! I feel the same exact way. For years I was so scared to write anything that I paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to have others write not only for myself but for my clients. I still need more and more practice, but I refuse to give up! Sometimes we just need to take that leap of faith and give the ole college try! If you are too busy and want to focus on what you do best which is running your business then you can use writers from sites such as Fiverr or UpWork. Though when hiring a SEO agency professional, they should have employees or outside contractors that should be able to put this content out there for your business. Just make sure that if you go this route you approve the content before it gets released. Knowing everything you know now after reading this you can determine if that is the content that you want to represent your company.

Conclusion

Take this knowledge and defeat your competition! Don’t let them get the upper hand through a digital presence. You need to take the steps necessary to make sure your company is on the path to being number one on search engines. This will be one of the most rewarding journeys you will take from a marketing standpoint. Being able to track new customers that have never been to your business or purchased your product just organically find you through the internet. The feeling becomes even more and more gratifying when you reflect upon all the steps it took to get you where you’re at in that moment.