To start an online business is one thing. It is way different to build something that has value and is foundable on the Internet. Just like in the physical world, in the virtual environment, we are striving to be found and noticed. Although not as efficient as today’s, marketing existed since people started trading. We can track its early versions back to the people that were yelling ‘fresh meat’(or anything else) at the local market.

Today marketing has an almost unrecognizable version. Although we are still ‘yelling’ to get the attention of potential customers, nowadays the shout is, in a way, silent. Yet, it get’s the attention of the people.

In its core, digital marketing is not much different from the native one.

The goal is to get the attention and ultimately to make the sale.

Still, digital marketing is way more efficient.

We can assign that efficiency to a lot of reasons. Those reasons are mainly embedded in the means of the digital marketing. And one of those means is SEO.

 

What is SEO?

First thing first, SEO is an abbreviation. It stands for Search Engine Optimization.

And the main idea behind SEO is to optimize your content for the Search Engines. In other words, to make your content affront the searches that people are making in the search engine. Of course, you should optimize for keywords, relevant to your business.

But before we jump into the SEO introduction, let’s extract a definition of SEO.

SEO Definition

The active efforts to affront search engine users’ queries with relevant, valuable and in-depth content is what we call SEO.

 

Introduction to SEO

Basically, SEO could be divided into two sections. On-page SEO and Off-Page SEO.

 

Off-Page SEO

Search Engines are crawling the web in order to find as much pages and websites as possible. While doing so, the bots that are crawling around are gathering and caching the websites, so that when a user searches for something the Engine will have enough information to know where and what is the most relevant information to that search(a.k.a query).  

But in the dawn of the SEO practices, people started to stuff their content with the keyword that they hoped(or knew) people interested in their product use to find information on the web.

That forced the search engines to change the rules in order not to let webmasters abuse them. That is why backlinks became so important. Now it is not only about how many times you’ve written the keyword you strive to rank for in your content. How many other websites believe that your content is relevant is also important. At least equally, if not more important.

On-Page SEO

Now that you know what Off-Page SEO is, you can probably guess that On-page SEO is the optimization that you are making on the page. In other words, the optimization of content.

The good news is that on-page you are the master of the sea. Meaning, the media is yours and you can link to whenever you feel necessary, and thus, ‘ vote’ for your own content. Although it is less important than links that are coming from relevant and authoritative websites, the links that you are giving to yourself are also important.

But there is more to On-page SEO than interlinking.

You should carefully choose the keywords that you’re striving to optimize your content to. Meaning devotes a piece of content to a very specific topic that search engine users are searching for.

When dividing your content to sub-titles, be careful with the words that you are giving an h1 value to.

 

Security, Design, and SEO

In order to optimize not only your content but also your chances for the content to be noticed, you need to take care of two more things.

Namely, security and design.

Search Engines, Google especially, are giving high ranking priority to websites that are secure and responsive.

This is done mainly for the search engine users, that are more and more using their mobile devices to search on the go.

If a user lands on a website that has security or design issues, most likely he or she will bounce and go to the next website in the Search Engine Result Page (a.k.a. SERP). And Google is striving to help people not to have such experience. Naturally, the Search Engine is pushing Responsive and Secure websites higher in the SERP’s.

 

Conclusion

SEO is a large realm of its own. There is always something more that you can learn, something that is worth trying, something that you didn’t know.

And while this article is not explaining it in depth, it is a neat but still, valuable introduction to SEO.

And once introduced to SEO, you’ll be able to decide whether you should implement it in your marketing (you should!) and if you are capable of doing that by yourself, or you’ll need someone to do it for you.

If you decide to do it by yourself, bear in mind that there is a lot, a lot more than this introduction to SEO, and you’ll have to learn a lot.

But in the end, it is worth it.

The first place in the SERP’s is always worth it.