Your chances of making a sale, acquiring a new client, or attracting new readers to your website increase with the number of visitors to your website. To put it simply, driving visitors to your website is essential to achieving your objectives. Understanding search engine optimization (SEO) is therefore crucial. You have more control over where your website appears in search engine results pages (SERPs), how many people see your website, and who finds you online when you know how to optimize it for various search ranking factors.

Continue reading to learn more about SEO, including how it works, best practices, and tools for tracking and enhancing SEO over time on your website.

Instead of focusing on traffic from paid search results, the SEO strategy we're discussing places more emphasis on organic search results and organic traffic. SEO can be broken down into two main areas: SEO and content marketing are technical.

The technical SEO of a website includes aspects of your website's design and structure, such as how quickly it loads or how it responds to different screen sizes.

The more content you create for your website, the more information you give search engines to understand and rank it, whether you start a blog or add descriptive copy to your landing pages.

Usually, free SEO tools are used to research search terms related to your business or brand's niche and then create new content related to those search terms to create high-quality content for SEO.

You can improve your website's SEO on your own, hire an expert to optimize it, or go over our SEO checklist. It's helpful to know how to do some SEO work yourself, no matter how you approach it. Your website needs to keep up with search engines' constant algorithm updates and content evaluation changes.

Even as search engine algorithms change, you can use SEO best practices to expand your audience with a basic understanding of how to influence your website's SEO.

Proper keyword research

You can find the most relevant words and phrases people use when looking for topics related to your products or services by conducting keyword research. You can use keywords in the copy and content of your website to get search engines to show your pages to people who are looking for them.

You can start with free tools like Google Search Console.

Effective website copy

Include keywords in your website's copy at all times. To help search engines read and rank your content, fill in the metadata on your website and include keywords in product URLs, product descriptions, page titles, blog headers, and image alt text—text that helps screen readers read your images.

Improve website design

Websites that provide a positive user experience (UX) rank higher in search engines. Websites that are mobile and tablet-friendly, prioritize readability in design, have clear site navigation, and have faster page speeds (meaning they load quickly) are more likely to rank.

Build topical authority

Blogs and other in-depth content that demonstrates your authority on brand-related subjects should be published. If you want to promote your photography business, for instance, you might start a blog to show off your knowledge and experience in the field. To demonstrate your expertise to search engines, you can link to other reputable sources in your content.

Measure and track your website

It takes time for search engines to crawl, index, and begin displaying your website to users, it can take weeks or months to see the results of an SEO strategy. To determine whether your SEO strategy is bringing people to your website, keep an eye on new visitors and traffic sources following your website's updates. To determine whether you are receiving qualified traffic, or visitors who are your intended audience, pay attention to metrics like bounce rate and conversion.