SEO is essential in the business world, but it can be overwhelming for people who have little knowledge about it. SEO can’t be oversimplified. Although it may be easy, SEO can still be quite complex to implement. For business owners, it is important for them to know more about SEO implementations. Here are some of the facts they need to know:
- SERP layout: SERP layout has evolved quite significantly in the past few years. However, the overall design is still similar, like the ten links for each page based on default settings. As an example, layout changes are usually intended to improve experience for people with mobile devices. Changes can also be intended to offer optimal experience for people who want to cascade to desktops. Other than text links, SERP layout also contains other types of information, such as nearest businesses, images, videos, news, shopping ads and others.
- SEO is hard work: SEO is a longer process and it doesn’t provide direct traffic, like paid advertising. SEO isn’t an easy win or a low-hanging fruit that’s easy to grab. SEO is a highly competitive activity and you need to work hard to get even a decent result. Not only high level of competition, regular search algorithm may also wreak havoc on your meticulously planned SEO campaign. In some cases, attempting to achieve high rank may feel like aiming at a highly moving target. Competitors are also actively gaining higher rank and external changes can be quite significant. So, you may need to re-adjust your plan regularly. In fact, SEO professionals know that they shouldn’t make any guarantee. Even for less competitive long tail keywords, it may take a few months to achieve rank positioning at first page.
- Search engines are in control: When your ranking position is very low, regardless of your hard work and quality inbound backlinks, you can’t simply call and pressure Google to give you a better positioning. Google owes us nothing and SEO professionals know that they get results based on their experience. Ultimately, we have no individual sway over how search engine services design their algorithms.
- Titles and tags are still important: Until today, there’s no SEO method that holds magical power to immediately influence search engine ranking. SEO professionals can hope to gain the most impact by focusing on many different factors. As an example, title and meta descriptions are still important to define the purpose and main topic of your website. It’s true that SEO is much more about titles and tags, but if you have wrong keywords for both, you won’t any get any quality traffic at all.
- You still need to submit sitemap: It’s an old-school SEO method, but still important. If your website is increasingly more complex in structure and you publish new webpages each day, you should make sure that Google has updated sitemap of your website. So, it won’t take too long for Google to index your website and it’s more likely for your new webpages to get listed in search results, so you can get traffic from it almost immediately.