SEO or search engine optimization is the process of increasing website traffic by increasing the visibility of a website to users on a web search engine site. Optimizing your website can bring you free and organic traffic to your website without you spending too much on advertising. When your SEO is optimized, you see more direct visitors.
There are a million reasons why your site may not be the top search on search engines. Search engines like Google scan, or crawl, websites to see what your site is really about; this way, they can lead people to your site based on the information on it.
While these search engines crawl through your site, they look at speed, content, website design, and searches for specific keywords.
Content is important. For instance, if you have a daily blog, writing the specific keyword within the article (i.e., “reviews of laptops”), the search engine crawl should be able to realize that you’re writing a review of laptops. The better the content is, the higher the chances your site will show up on search engines. Creating fresh, up-to-date content helps place you higher up as well.
It helps the search engine crawl if you have title tags, a meta description, sub-headings in your post, internal links, and if your images and ALT tags are correctly labeled.
Off-page SEO are things that you may not have control over but can improve on overtime. For instance, Google looks at the trustworthiness of sites by checking backlinks (links to your website from other trustworthy sites). Social signals such as likes, shares, and tweets all help boost your SEO rankings. The more people share, the more search engines see you as trustworthy.
The Bottom Line
You can make simple changes to your website and update your content to help your search engine ranking go up. You have to keep in mind that it takes time for your SEO changes to reflect on your search engine ranking, and there may be a ton of different factors that affect it, but every little bit helps.