SEO optimization — this is how it works

Anyone who deals with online marketing or websites sooner or later stumbles across the terms SEO and SEO optimization. There are countless contributions and various tips on this topic, which can quickly be overwhelming for beginners. But SEO isn't magic, it's a simple process that can bring you lots of new visitors to your website. To make this process as easy as possible for you, we have collected and summarized the most important information here.

What is SEO?

SEO means search engine optimization. The aim is to optimize your own website so that it is ranked as well as possible in search engines such as Google. This is because Google, for example, has a ranking in the background of the search engine, which rates websites according to the level of optimization and places them accordingly in the search results. For this reason, it is essential to regularly optimize your own site from an SEO perspective for a successful presence on the Internet. This is because most visitors who come to a website consist of organic new users, i.e. people who find the page on their own in searches. If you want to tackle actual optimization, you have to look at two overarching areas, on-page and off-page SEO. These two categories are considered in more detail below.

On-page SEO

On-page SEO is the thematic area that describes the technical and content measures that you take on your own website. The goal is for the crawler, i.e. the Google program that scans the website, to easily reach all content and index all relevant information. In order to achieve this, there are various points that must be considered. First, the technical aspects of the site are examined.
On the one hand, the page speed must be optimized. Pagespeed describes the loading speed of the page. In order to improve this, you should in particular reduce the file size of the existing images on the page, because too large photos particularly affect the speed.
In addition to page speed, the mobile functionality of the website must also be optimized. Because the majority of users now access a website via a mobile device, which is why the page must look and function well on a mobile phone or tablet.
In addition, you should definitely pay attention to how your website deals with 404 pages, i.e. missing pages after links and links, because the program also tests that.
Other technical aspects that are a bit less relevant include the page's URL structures.

In addition to the technical measures, there are also content points that should be optimized. First, there are several things to consider when creating the content of the page. The keyword strategy is particularly important here. The topic of keywords will be discussed later in this post. In addition, the structure of the headlines must be observed and there should be no duplicate content.
You should also make sure to provide the existing images with SEO-relevant information. These are primarily alternative text that describes what the image shows and a title for the image, which should contain relevant keywords whenever possible.

Off-page SEO

Offpage SEO describes all measures that you can take outside the website you want to optimize. There are not many different measures that you can carry out yourself, but it is primarily about generating backlinks. Backlinks are links to third-party websites that link to your site. The more backlinks your page can have, the better it is rated by Google. However, Google not only examines the number of backlinks on your site, but also the quality of the link. That's why the best backlinks are earned, so the operator of another site found your content so important that they wanted to link to you. You can also buy backlinks, but purchased backlinks are rated worse.

In addition to backlinks, local SEO is also an essential part of off-page SEO. This means that your company appears in your area in location-based searches. To do this, you should definitely have a Google My Business profile so that Google Maps can include your company in the algorithm. A detailed explanation of Google My Business can be found in this blog post.

Keywords

The first step in creating content should be researching keywords. Keywords are the search terms that potential visitors to your site could search for on Google. This research isn't easy. Because, of course, you should choose keywords that are searched for often, but not so often that you have to compete with the websites of large companies. Because a large company that can only use an entire department for SEO will definitely always take the first places in Google searches for specific keywords. Since you have no chance in these search queries, you should definitely pay attention to competition for a specific keyword. To make this research easier, there are various tools online that can help you with this. For example, there is Ubersuggest. There you can enter the potential keyword and immediately receive various information about the search term. You also get various suggestions for alternative keywords that you could use.
Once you've selected the right keywords, you'll need to use them on the website as well. It is important that the term is used often enough and in different hierarchies, i.e. headings, etc. However, you can't simply use the keyword everywhere on the page, because Google also examines the context and checks whether it's organically inserted into texts or headlines.

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