Since its invention by Tim Berners-Lee in 1990, the Internet has grown to truly epic proportions. Educational institutions from elementary schools to post-secondary programs require students to complete homework through online learning interfaces, if not offer classes in their entirety using the Internet. Billions of people from around the world use social media to connect with friends, family members, and coworkers. Tracking, calculating, and processing work-related data has been made markedly easier with help from spreadsheets like Excel, and even more recent developments that allow students or employees share information in real-time with one another using programs like Google Docs.
No matter where we look, the Internet is everywhere. The same goes for search engines, largely beginning with modern-day giant Googles foundation in 1998. It’s no argument that when people aggregate together their Internet usage, search engines are more popular than any other type of web activity, with an astounding 6.6 billion searches in a modern day’s time.
With sooooooo many people using search engines to solicit answers to questions, help with homework, settle debates between friends, find consumer goods, and locate nearby restaurants or retail stores, it’s important for your entity to rise above other websites on searches relevant to your operations.
Let’s Define SEO – Search Engine Optimization
While most of us have a general understanding of what search engine optimization, many of us don’t really know how many facets there are to it. It’s important for us to understand that there are nearly 100 ways to work on your sites SEO strategy from Site Optimization, On-Page Optimization, and even Off-Page Optimization and that Google has over 1000′ variables in its ranking algorithm.
Search engine optimization
The primary goal of search engine optimization’s is to put your companies website in front of the people searching the web for a product or service that you offer. To do this you need to come up early in the search results with a major focus on getting that first-page rank. With a first page rank, you are pretty much guaranteed to get 50% more clicks than if you were on page 2 for a searched term. And with a first place rank, you will get on average 33% more clicks than if you were in position 2 for the searched term.
Need help learning the importance of keywords? Read… Understanding Keywords?
What do search engine rankings hinge upon?
Search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing return websites based on users’ location, cookies stored in their browsers, and – most importantly – the terms and phrases actually typed in engines’ search bars. However, the full list of factors utilized by Google and company are kept secret, for the most part, although a simple Internet search can reveal most of them.
This article covers how content affects web pages’ search performance in relation to what words users enter into search bars. Content includes advertisements posted on behalf of independent third parties, the text of “how to” articles or blog posts, images, etc. – virtually everything we see on sites.
Here’s what a Content SEO audit, or SEO Content Audit, is
The subject of content audits include all links, image tags, titles, subtitles, the clarity and relevance of URLs, the presence and credibility of backlinks, how recent content is and whether it’s outdated or not, and much, much more.
Rather than writing an innumerable count of words about the different types of content measured with these search engine optimization metrics, let’s peer into the basic steps of performing a Content SEO Audit.
- Review Your Websites’ Contents And Compile Them On A Spreadsheet
- Utilize Web Tools To Gauge The Quality Of Your Entity’s Web Content And Its Search Engine Performance
- Craft Your Plan Of Reconstructive Action
1. Review Your Websites’ Contents And Compile Them On A Spreadsheet
Earlier, we defined search engine optimization. Unlike the goal of most lessons and other educational endeavors, it’s likely that most of you already grasped the basic concepts of SEO and could have formed an accurate definition without referencing dictionaries or – coincidentally enough – turned to a search engine for nearly instantaneous help.
Similarly, even if you’re already fully aware of the concrete specifications of all content and their respective traits, it’s absolutely crucial to define them, after which making inventory them in a spreadsheet or other computer-based data storage solution. Without understanding the inventory of web content you have on your company’s official site, social media presences, and other sources of information related to your entity, it’s practically impossible to calculate meaningful inferences regarding potential SEO performance increases or downgrades, rendering the purpose of an SEO content audit useless.
2. Utilize Web Tools To Gauge The Quality Of Your Entity’s Web Content And Its Search Engine Performance
The next logical step is to evaluate the search engine performance of these types of data, page by page. Rather than tallying scores on your website as a whole, segmenting social media, your entity’s website, and other sources of content, page by page, you’ll be able to reason which pages need attention more than others, even to the level of their particular components. There are plenty of free tools found in the form of web-based applications that don’t even require downloads to evaluate the severity or trivialness of your website’s deficiencies.
3.Craft Your Plan Of Reconstructive Action
Your next and final step is to plan out necessary changes. As the Internet – especially search engines – are used more often than ever, boasting high average search engine performance equates to success in the marketplace. If necessary, allocate larger portions of your entity’s budget to search engine optimization. You can never go wrong with soliciting the opinions and insight of reputable, top-tier digital marketing consultants or the website developers that implement them into action.