Digital marketing agencies offer all sorts of services designed to help you succeed online. Ditto for SEO firms and web developers. All their services are good. They are all necessary. But at the end of the day, SEO is at the heart of online success. And at the core of every successful SEO campaign are three things.
Those three things are discussed at length in this post. If you are new to the whole SEO thing, consider this your introduction to SEO’s foundational principles. If you do not have these three things, you don’t have much of an SEO campaign. And if that is the case, all your digital marketing efforts will be largely in vain.
1. Solid Technicals
SEO is all about taking the necessary steps to ensure a website performs well on the major search engines. The ultimate goal is to see to it that sites and posts rank highly on search engine results pages (SERPs). To do that, you need solid technicals.
Google’s search algorithm is not human. It is essentially computer software. It can only understand and rank websites based on the technical data it finds. Search engine algorithms rely exclusively on the technical aspects of a website to figure it all out.
Without solid technicals, search engine algorithms have no way of analyzing content. They have no means for determining relevance. That leaves them to do the computer equivalent of guesswork. Poor rankings are the inevitable result.
2. High-Quality Content
Where search engine algorithms look at a website’s technical aspects, human beings look at the content. Think about your own experience. You don’t go digging under the hood of your favorite website to see what makes it work. You visit the site because you want the products or information it offers.
What you are after is what companies like Webtek Digital Marketing refer to as ‘content‘. And by the way, you are after the same thing every other web user is after – high quality content. Content quality is judged on many different levels, including:
- grammar and spelling
- syntax
- readability
- relevance
- accuracy
Search engine algorithms can analyze quality to a certain degree. But they cannot mimic the human brain in this regard. Still, if content quality is poor enough to drive visitors away, search engine algorithms will pick up on that. Less favorable SERP results would be expected.
3. High-Quality Backlinks
The final piece of the puzzle is the backlink. A backlink is a link from one site back to the site being promoted via SEO. For the best possible results, you want high quality backlinks. These are backlinks that come from reputable sites that rank well in their own rights.
Search engine algorithms not only record backlinks, but they also take note of the online reputations of the websites they are found on. The more backlinks a site has from other reputable sites, the more powerful each of those backlinks is in boosting overall SEO performance.
A Triangle of Support
If you didn’t notice, the three principles discussed here create a triangle of support. The first side is the search engine algorithm; the second side is the web user; the third side is the website owner who chooses to link back. All three support the success of an SEO campaign. Remove one and a campaign will not be nearly as effective.
You can take all the SEO and digital marketing strategies now being offered and boil them down to these three things. Success is all about strong technicals, high-quality content, and quality backlinks. That is SEO in a nutshell.
