1. Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is one of the best ways to increase website traffic. And it's completely free.

Implementing SEO best practices helps search engines crawl your site and rank your content near the top of search engine results pages (SERPs).

There are three types of SEO:

On-page SEO: This refers to using primary and secondary keywords to optimize the actual content of your website — the landing pages, blog posts — including the headers, subheaders, meta descriptions, image alt texts, and URLs.
These keywords are usually phrases that your audience puts in Google's search bar to find your content. Short, broad keywords are main keywords, and they're really competitive. That's why you should focus on optimizing for long-tail keywords as they're a bit more narrow and have less competition than main keywords.
Another important aspect of on-page SEO is internal links. This involves adding links in your blog posts and web pages to other relevant pages on your website. This directs people to your other content and increases the time people stay on your site, helping to increase your site's credibility and your chances of converting visitors to paying customers.
Off-page SEO: This refers to SEO tactics you do outside your website to improve your rankings on the SERPs.
Off-page SEO involves improving a site's relevance, authority, trustworthiness, and popularity so that search engines can understand how valuable it is and rank it higher. The best way to achieve this is to build a strong backlink profile.

You get a backlink when other reputable websites, pages, and people on the Internet link to your site. The more high-quality backlinks you have, the higher your site authority becomes. Search engines translate these links to mean that other trusted sites on the Internet are affirming the quality of your content. Not only will this boost your search engine ranking, but you may also get traffic from sites that link to you.

Building a good backlink profile, however, doesn't happen overnight. You'll have to create high-quality content, write guest posts for other sites, and maybe even reach out to other site owners to ethically exchange backlinks.

But the most important thing is that you stay patient. Building up a site takes time, but its rewards are near boundless.

Technical SEO: This involves improving the technical aspects of your websites to meet the requirements of search engines. You can have the most beautiful website loaded with high-quality content, but if your technical SEO isn't right, you won't rank.

Important elements of technical SEO include:

Crawling, rendering, and indexing
URL structure
Page speed
Site architecture
XML sitemaps
Thin content
Duplicate content
Canonical tags
JavaScript
Structured data
Hreflang
301 redirects
401 pages, etc.

Technical SEO is best handled by an expert. This is one area where a bit of investment can pay exponential dividends (and save you from investing a ton of time and effort trying to learn it).

M4:S2 - Search Engine Optimization

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