SEO is a huge and complicated subject. You can dedicate years of your life to studying it and still not be able to fully grasp everything. In this video, we’ll briefly go over some of the major aspects of SEO to give you a rough idea of the type of work that goes into optimizing a website. In subsequent videos, we’ll cover each category in much more detail so you can start to a build a well-rounded understanding of SEO.
If you’re ready to learn more, check out our video on on-page optimization.
Video Transcription
Hey Pronto People! Tim here. Today, I want to cover a question that I think our clients don’t ask enough and that is: what is SEO?
In a traditional sense, SEO has been all about getting rankings for a specific keyword searches or drawing traffic into your website through search engines. In more recent years, it’s developed into this holistic marketing practice that’s about content marketing or building your brand and encompasses a whole lot more than just search engines.
For this video today I’m going to break SEO down into four sections: on-page optimization, off-page optimization, technical SEO and local SEO.
On-page optimization is everything you can see on your browser when you visit your page. It’s the content on your page, the keywords within that content. It’s the title tags and the HTML heading tags and the alt-text for your images.
All that gets indexed by Google and they have some special magic that they do behind the scenes in their servers to help determine what your page is actually about.
Off-page SEO is basically everything outside of your website. It’s citations on another blog, links from another website and Google looks at all of that to help determine how authoritative or how popular your page is. All of that gets a lot more complicated, but in a basic sense, the number and the quality of links pointing to your site lead to more authority and more popularity which then leads to better rankings.
Technical SEO is everything behind the scenes, it’s everything you can’t see on your browser. The source-code behind the page, the JavaScript; it’s HTTP status codes, how you handle redirects, and how search engine bots are able to access different pages on your site.
Local SEO is really important for a lot of our clients because it focuses a lot on small businesses that are serving a local community. For example, if you are searching for Thai restaurants in San Jose, California, Google would return a list of results to have a map next to it and pinpoints on that map showing you the location of each restaurant. That’s a local search result and there’s a whole different set of strategies involved in achieving rankings on those results.
You need to make sure you’re listed in all the major directories like Yelp or Angie’s List or City Search and most importantly on Google+ local listings. You need to make sure you have positive reviews from your happy clients and that you’re listed in local blogs that are reviewing or talking about your business.
That’s it for now. I’m going to cover all of these topics in more detail in future videos, but hopefully you have a better understanding of what SEO is.
Thanks!
