Search engine optimization (SEO) sounds complicated and technical. And it can be. There are a lot of advanced practices that can be applied to your website as part of your online marketing strategy. But at the end of the day, search engine optimization is really a set of practices that help get specific pieces of content (like blog posts and web pages) to rank higher up for specific search terms.
This means that when someone (hopefully your potential buyer of your digital products) decides to type a few words in Google as part of researching a solution to their problem, one of your articles or posts appears near the top of the organic search results.
“Organic” search results are essentially all of the results that are not ads. Online marketers can pay to have their listing at the top of Google’s search results, and these are commonly referred to as “paid” search results.
Search engine optimization practices can be applied to any web page on your website, whether it is a post or a page, or whether they are articles you publish. A page could even be a web page you publish to share your images, video, or audio content, provided there is descriptive text on the page that a search engine can index.
This distinction is important because most of the search engine optimization work you do is not about optimizing your website. Most of the SEO work you’ll do is about optimizing pages for specific search terms, or keyword phrases.
When you think about it, you don’t use a search engine to find a website. You use a search engine to find an answer to a specific question or problem, and that answer is probably going to be on a specific page within a website.
That being said, there are some general things you can do for your entire site in the service of search engine optimization, like make sure the page structure enables search engines to read the text, submitting your site map to Google, and securing your site to ensure there is no malware. But by and large, most of your work will happen page by page.
There is not a magic wand someone can wave over your website and “optimize” it. The work we cover in the SEO Guide for Busy Moms is all about what you can do to optimize individual pages on your website. In the guide, you’ll learn to focus on the easiest, most effective practices that won’t take a lot of time and energy. More importantly, layering on this little bit of extra work will help you make the most of all the time and energy you are already investing in your content, so it will work longer and harder for you and your business for years to come.
Click here to learn more about the SEO Guide for Busy Moms