What Are The 4 Important Pillars Of SEO?
SEO process is made technical by none other than SEOs themselves. If you search SEO on the web, you will find hundreds of sites giving SEO tips but all tips point in one direction that is a high rank in SERPs.
Here I’ve tried to simplify the process by dividing it into four broad categories. You can check your SEO efforts by using these four categories as metrics and see how your site is doing on search engines.
1 Technical SEO
It is related to web design and development and its objective is to strengthen interplay between design, development, and SEO. The result achieved is responsive design and fast downloading speed. Primary goals of technical SEO are:
• The site should be easy to crawl
• Search engine should recognize with pages to index and return
• Responsive design
• Quick page load time
• Alignment of the content structure of the site
While most of the technical functionality can be monitored from CMS, for others you can rely on tools like Screaming Frog and Deep Crawl that crawl sites to find gray areas.
2 On-Site SEO
Technical SEO will make a strong foundation for on-site optimization that will further enhance crawl-ability and user-experience of the site. With technical SEO, on-site optimization becomes straightforward. But the site should be optimized as a whole at the individual page level. Starting with making a well-structured content hierarchy you can move forward to:
• Researching high traffic relevant keywords
• Writing URL description in simple language
• Insert keywords in page titles
• Write meta descriptions like ad copies to drive clicks
• Optimizing content with sensible use of keywords
• Using call to
action buttons
• Improving CTR with structured data markup
The most important thing to remember when optimizing website is targeted audiences. If your customers are in local market then you should follow local SEO guidelines.
3 Content
It is needless to say that in online marketing it is the content that plays kingmaker. Google, Bing and other search engines follow content. And also SEOs optimize content. But there seems to be a communication gap between SEOs and search engines. It seems that not all type of content is optimized.
For SEO, content can be divided into three broad categories:
• Service content that provides general information on the site like its physical location and business
• Credibility content shows potential and advantages of the business the site offers
• Marketing content introduces the site as an expert in its domain and pursued visitors to be its customers
SEO is important for all type of content but markets put more focus on service content than others. Credibility content like reviews, feedbacks, case studies and portfolios is often ignored in SEO. But those that understand the value of content optimization do all round optimization to achieve higher ROI. Content marketing has an advantage that is it has no additional cost per click but the return on investment is quite high.
4 Off-Site SEO
Finally, all SEO efforts work towards brand building and establishing authority. While on-site optimization and content marketing can provide real help in branding in the long run but you also need link building. You know that Google counts each link as a vote but the links should be natural. There are many ways to link building and also there are many tools for keeping a tab over poor linking.
Summary
SEO need not be a complicated process as the objective is simple that is to highlight presence by reaching out to as many clients as possible. Websites rely on search results to get customers and it is where they need to be careful with their efforts.