If you're considering a new website for your business, or want to know how to make your site rank higher in search engines, this article is for you.
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is simply too important to ignore. Business owners need to have an understanding of how SEO works. More than that, a healthy realization of its pitfalls is also necessary.
It’s easy to develop the wrong expectations for SEO of your website, and the required effort it takes. And the market is littered with dubious claims – making it difficult to determine sound advice from hyperbole.
In an effort to provide some clarity, here are a few SEO FAQs answered.
What’s the most common SEO myth or misunderstanding that you see from users?
People tend to forget that SEO is a lot of work. There is no "magic bullet," it's a process. While advances in technology have made it a lot easier to build a website, it hasn’t become much easier to rank a site well in search engines. So, you really need to put some effort into it.
True, your web developer should design your site SEO in mind. This includes inserting descriptive text into each page, inserting meta data (the html that search engines look at), into each page of the site, then submitting the site to Google for indexing.
Unfortunately, your developer can only do so much. They can’t write that epic piece of content for you. They can give you hints on what to improve, but they can’t set out a strategy for you. You need to put in the work.
Some people seem to think that you’re done with SEO once you enter title tags, some keywords, and submit a site for indexing. While those steps are essential, it’s only the beginning.
Should every piece of content on a website be optimized, or should the focus be on the most important content?
Ideally, you should have thought about every piece of content on your website. Every article or every page should have a goal.
Of course, that’s hardly how it works in practice. You might have a site with hundreds or thousands of pages added over many years. That is the reality for many sites.
In cases like this, you have to go through all that content and make hard choices — do I really need this? Do these pieces of content fit my goals? Do they bring traffic? Do they help my brand?
You can start going over everything and improve the pieces of content you want to keep while deleting and redirecting the ones you don’t need. In addition, you can also choose to merge a couple of low-value pages or content into a single really good one.