Digital Marketing - What is SEO?

[Omar Ruiz]

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) seems to bring up a lot of unknowns to many investors who are interested in building their website and online presence. The push around implementing SEO is to help rank your site so it can reach page 1 on Google searches. This is called organic search results. You can increase your traffic by working on SEO which will, in time, increase your ranking, thus increasing traffic. But. many folks still do not know what is SEO, how can it be applied to your website, and the length of time it will take until you see results.

My question is can folks share your experience of SEO implementation? How long did it take? What do you really need to know? How did you learn about SEO and do you need to hire people to teach you about this tactic?

Here are the basic categories of what I have learned about SEO:

Offpage - Things you can't control on your site, but can have an influence on how it gets ranked. 

• Building Backlinks (from aged and trusted domains)
• Social Reputation/Social Shares
• Offline Marketing

Onpage - Things you have control within your site, that you can make changes to right now.

• Content
  
  • Keword Research
    • Short Tail Keywords
    • Long Tail Keywords
  • Keyword Planning
  • Keyword Organization
    • Keyword Density
  • Body Copy
    • Quality
    • Content research
    • Freshness
  • Header tags (H1/H2/H3)
• Vertical Search (Images/VIdeo/News)
• Title Tags
• Meta Description
• Alt Tags
• Alt Description
• Permalinks
• Descriptive URLS
• User Experience (UX)/User Interface (UI)
• Mobile Responsive
• Silo Structure
• Use of Images/Videos
• SSL Certificate (https)
• Site Speed
• Sitemap
• Internal/Outbound Links
• Link/Anchor Text
• Blogs

Violations

• Duplicate content
• Cloaking
• Thin Content
• Keyword Stuffing
• Piracy
• Ads/Top Heavy Layout
• Paid Links
• Link Spam