What is SEO?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and its function is to improve a website’s overall ranking in search engine results. In our modern digital age, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has become key in the future success of all businesses. Understanding and applying SEO factors to your website will help increase click rates and traffic on your site, ultimately gaining your business more online market exposure.

How Does SEO Work?

Each search engine uses a unique ranking algorithm to determine the relevance of a page in relation to a query. Different algorithms will return different variations of results, but most search engines consider most of the same criteria when ranking the relevance of a webpage. Some of the criteria used to determine page rank include keyword frequency, relevance of content to the query, prominence of the organization, website popularity, and service location, just to name a few.

Organic SEO == Good Site content and good Content Management System (CMS)

InOrganic SEO == Paid keywords or links to site

SEO v. PPC

What is the difference between SEO and PPC?

Search Engine Optimization

• Organically developed
• Influences organic search results (Organic or Natural Search = Unpaid)
• Edit code and content to improve visibility in search engines (without paying)

Pay-per-Click

• Inorganic SEO
• Firms bid on keywords to obtain
• Lucrative Ad ranking

Inorganic (Paid) SEO v. Organic SEO

Most search engines provide both organic and inorganic search results when answering a query. Paid listings usually appear at the top of the results page followed by organic listings. Paid listings are basically paid advertisements and they inorganically boost traffic to a site by purchasing the rights to list as a top result for certain queries. Pay-per-click (PPC) is the most common type of inorganic SEO where the advertiser pays the search engine each time someone clicks on their ad. Advertising your site with PPC may end up producing some positive results in the short-term, but ultimately it’s not a good long-term investment. If you are paying for any type of inorganic SEO, like PPC, it will go away when you stop paying. If you continue to pay, the cost will only continue to increase.

Businesses or PPC Firms place bids on certain keywords, contending with each other for priority placement on results pages. Bidding for keywords is competitive and usually increases over time as the competition continues to increase. Once you stop bidding, all of that exposure disappears and your website goes back to being ranked solely on its organic factors.

If your long term goal is to develop a high quality website that will give you a competitive edge in your market, then you should focus on developing your site’s Organic SEO.

If you’re not careful you can face significant financial losses by paying to target keywords that are indexed organically; therefore, only producing organic search results. Paying to target keywords is many times wasted money since many of those keywords already account for things built in to the content on your site.

Some sites provide analytics on how Search Engines index keywords. You should absolutely NOT pay for targeting keywords that exist on those reports. Use the following links to see keyword indexing reports.

Keyword Index Data Locations

• Google Analytics
• Google Search Console
• Bing Webmaster Toolbox

To access Google Analytics and Webmaster tools, check out our Blog on Creating a Google Account.

Get better results through good content including metadata, relevant keyword use in your descriptions, open graph data, and rich content like tagged pictures and videos.

Organic SEO

SEO comes organically, which means it's not something you can just buy; rather, it has to be built into the structure of your website and the content you create for it. The best way to attain Organic SEO for your website is by modifying the code and on-page content of your site in ways that makes it most visible to search engines.

The rank of an organic listing can be improved by implementing SEO practices, and if you can optimize these, you can see huge increases in traffic to your site. Some of the most influential factors that affect SEO are directly related to a website’s content and structure.

Content: Quality Over Quantity

You may feel compelled to continuously add new content to your website, thinking more content will lead to more exposure and more web traffic. That is a reasonable conclusion, but not a totally accurate one. You can fill your site up with content like blogs, pictures, video, etc., but that doesn’t mean your web traffic will increase. The amount of content you create isn’t as important as the quality of the content. High quality content is content that offers some kind of real value to its audience. The best kind of content is original, accurate, actionable and easy for consumers to read or experience. Blog pages, guides and informational pages are good examples of high quality content. 

What to learn more about writing high quality content? Check out our Blog on (Re) Writing Quality Web Content. 

Applying SEO

Organic SEO strategies improve your site ranking by focusing on the technical aspects of your site structure. Your content will only attract more web traffic if you take the time to apply organic SEO strategies to your content and page layout. Some of these strategies include making sure every page has a relevant page title, writing good meta descriptions, and adding microdata tags to rich content. All these things make it easier for search-engine an accurate read of your site’s information.

For example, search engine spiders won’t be able to interpret rich content like audio, video, or image files if they are not tagged or don’t include relevant descriptive keywords in the file name. If a search engine can’t recognize the relevance of the content, then none of it will be considered when your sight is ranked for its relevance to a query. By taking the time to title, tag and categorize your content, you can improve the readability of your site, which will also improve your ranking in search engine results.

The Key to Success

The key to a successful website is a good Content Management System (CMS). A good CMS will make it easy for you to manage all of the SEO factors talked about in this article.

All you need is a good CMS and you can begin building up your own website for free.

Our experts here at Wildcard recognized the need for a high quality, open source CMS that was user friendly, intuitive, offered site security, and could seamlessly integrate social media platforms and other rich content into a website. This led to the conception and creation of CastleCMS, Wildcard’s custom content management system that allows you to organize many components of your website.

We take great pride in being able to integrate CastleCMS with your existing systems and provide you with design, customization, training, documentation, and support you can rely on. Each CastleCMS project is a custom-developed solution with costs based on each client’s needs.

For more information on how CastleCMS can benefit your business, visit Castlecms.io for a list of features.

Don’t forget to sign up for a FREE demo!