What is SEO & Why Entrepreneurs Need It

Guest article by Nick Musica

Founder/CEO of Opticsin.com an SEO and web design company.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the foundation of organic marketing. A good SEO strategy will push your site up the Google rankings, which means that when someone searches for a relevant keyword, they’ll see your site, click your link, and potentially buy your products or services.

You don’t pay for those clicks, and there’s no commission for Google, either. Get this right, and your business or personal brand will flourish.

What Does SEO Entail?

SEO is often overthought and overcomplicated by novice entrepreneurs. They see Google as an omnipotent, omniscience lord of the web and SEO as a complex puzzle needed to win favor.

It can be complicated. There are a lot of elements involved, after all, and these are convoluted by changing algorithms, trends, and seemingly random variations. But there is an easy way of looking at it.

 Ultimately, Google wants to create a better experience for the user. They don’t care about the entrepreneurs trying to dazzle them with big budget campaigns and overly aggressive strategies. It’s all about the searcher—if they can get the answers they seek in a clear, concise format, they are happy, Google is happy, and the site is rewarded with a higher ranking.

 But, of course, Google doesn’t employ editors to read and critique every piece of content. Instead, it relies on an algorithm that considers various aspects, all of which are grouped into the three pillars of SEO.

 1.    Technical SEO

 One of the most important steps is also one of the most overlooked: Google can’t crawl your site if you don’t let it.

 Technical SEO is all about making life easier for Google and the user. You have to make sure Google can crawl and index your site while also giving it a simple, clean, and navigable layout.

 Technical SEO includes aspects such as: 

• Sitemaps: An index of your site with links that Google can instantly crawl.
• Page Speed: Internet users lose patience very quickly. If a site is slow, they may click off before it has time to load. Everything has to be instant.
• URL Structure: Simple and relevant is always best.
• Navigation: The ease at which someone can find certain sections of your site.
• Security: It’s a big concern for Google, and it’s a priority for many users, as well.

 2.    On-Page SEO

 Google uses various tools to assess the quality of a website’s content.

 Keywords are the best-known of these. In the Wild West days of the World Wide Web, webmasters spammed their sites with keyword lists that Google would then crawl and present to its users.

 These days, keywords are still important, but they must be used in a natural context. Google isn’t just counting how many times you used a specific keyword in a blog article. It adopts a holistic approach:

 Has that keyword been overused or underused, suggesting the content is forced or not relevant?

• Has it been used alongside other relevant keywords and topics?
• Are users actually engaging with the content?
• Is the content original?
• Does it contain useful resources and information?
• Was it written/checked/edited by an industry professional?

 On-page SEO also extends to the following:

 Tags: Image descriptions crawled by Google.

• Internal Linking: Linking relevant articles in your content will send the message that you’re writing helpful, relevant content while making navigation easier for users.
• Meta Data: The information shown to users when your page appears in a search listing.

 The content you create as part of an SEO strategy will dictate which pages appear in the Google rankings and which keywords rank highest. A good strategy, therefore, will include blog pages and guides, as well as product/service descriptions and FAQs.

Once again, you’re providing helpful content by showing the hows and whys of your brand, assisting the user and appeasing Google in the process.

 3.    Off-Page SEO

 You’ve guessed it—this pillar of SEO relates to everything that happens away from your website.

 We’ve already addressed how keywords, tags, and other on-page SEO elements signify relevance.

But how does Google know you’re creating good content that users enjoy and not just writing gibberish interspersed with the odd keyword and tag? More importantly, how does it know the difference between a good article and a great one?

For Google, it’s all about authority.

If a site that Google respects (one with high authority) links to your article, your site becomes more trusted by association. In Google’s eyes, the link was earned and justified. Of course, that’s not always how it works in practice, as webmasters just buy those links, but there are other considerations.

The more your brand is mentioned on authority sites, the greater its trust score becomes. Creating lots of good content, therefore, should lead to organic mentions on social media, question/answer sites, forums, blogs, news sites, and anywhere else that links to helpful content.

It could be something as simple as a news site linking to the About Us page of an entrepreneur it has just written about, a citation linking to an academic text, or even a blogger mentioning another blogger out of admiration for their work.

Guest posts are also commonly used for this purpose. An entrepreneur will write a blog for a high-authority website on the condition that it includes a link back to their website.

 Links are currency traded between webmasters. The richer you are, the greater your authority will be, and the higher in the rankings you will climb.

 Everything that you do to promote your site away from your own blog pages (reviews, comments, social media mentions) can help to build off-page SEO and show Google that you’re a trusted and respected authority in your industry.

Conclusion: Implementing the Three Pillars of SEO

 In an ideal world, publishing high-quality, original content about your area of expertise should be enough to rank highly. And it can be, but it takes time for that content to take seed on other websites and earn the kind of authority that Google respects. That’s why SEO strategies consider various other aspects, accounting for everything from meta/image tags to authority links and social media marketing, all while keeping the technical side of things clean and problem free.

It's a lot of work, and it takes a long time to learn it all, but that knowledge could eventually lead to the sort of organic growth that will help any business to succeed.

Want more?

You can listen to Nick Musica on the UnNoticed Entrepreneur podcast