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What is SEO (Part 2 of 3)

Welcome to the second part of our three part guide to answer the question: What is SEO? In part 1 we covered links – in part 2 today, we’ll discuss the various optimizations you can do on-site to improve your rankings. In other words, SEO intermediate.

The two on-site variables that Google takes into account the most are your page titles, and your page urls. This is good news, because these can both be changed easily by any decent webmaster. What’s important here is to spend time performing keyword research before you make any edits, to see what kind of terms you want to try to rank for to be found by your customers. Sometimes, these terms can be different than whatever you were expecting, particularly if your industry deals with a lot of jargon that the average person doesn’t know.

Once you know what keywords you want to be targeting for, include those keywords in both the web page title and url. A longer keyword phrase is much easier to target than just one keyword. Make sure to be specifically targeting one keyword phrase for each page of your site – this will allow for much more efficient optimization!

It’s also important to note one more variable: meta-descriptions. These won’t affect the order that you’re ranked in on seearch engines, but it is the paragraph that gets shown under your web page title when you do show up on Google or Bing’s pages. This reason alone means that you must spend time editing your meta-descriptions. They can be the crucial difference between a 1% click-through rate and a 5% click-through rate. It’s one of the best investments in time you can make.

These three variables are the most important things to consider when looking at your own site for SEO. Next time, we’ll cover the ethics of SEO (and why you should never be tempted to do it poorly), as well as where we believe the future of SEO is going.