The Not So Scary Truth About SEO - Heying
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The Not So Scary Truth About SEO

SEO is a term that is thrown around in daily conversations around the office, but what does it mean exactly? SEO stands for “search engine optimization,” and it is the process of affecting the visibility of a website in a search engine’s unpaid results, which are often referred to as “organic” or “earned” results.

SEO rules can change upon a moment’s notice. It is important to stay in the information loop so you are getting the traffic you deserve to your website. Ultimately, understanding how SEO works will help draw in more visits to your site.

  • You must be mobile friendly.

If your site is not mobile-friendly, you will not rank in mobile search results. Mobile search is the pinnacle of local SEO making up 60% of searches.

  • Bad SEO is bad for business.

A nickname for the bad guys in Western movies, “Black Hat” SEO is a practice that increases a page’s rank in search engines through means that violate the search engines’ terms of service. Black Hat SEO evolves as search engines change the rules about what is acceptable and what is not; tactics that were once good become toxic. As long as you are filling your website with quality content, link to other quality sites, and stay on top of innovations, you are golden.

  • Duplicate content can hurt your SEO, but not always.

Duplicate content is not as bad as it once was for a website. As long as you use recognized tags when you republish content on your site, duplicate content is not as devastating as you might imagine. If a site is using your content without permission, you should still report them, but there is less need to worry about consequences from Google.

  • Incoming links are not always good for SEO.

Incoming links are a great way to boost your ranking, except when the place that is linking to you has some sort of authority issue. Questionable domains and sites unrelated to your industry can hurt you rank. In this case, quality is far more important than quantity.

  • Everything must be relevant.

Everything you publish on your site must be related to your website’s focus. Image descriptions, HTML tags, title, sub-headers, and other page attributions should all be semantically related to the purpose of your page.