If you are a small business owner and wonder what the marketing budget should be like, then you must keep aside 7-8% of your budget for marketing. Well, this is a benchmark figure for small businesses with annual revenue of $5 million as declared by Small Business Administration (SBA). The message is clear that you must pay special attention to marketing. Since branding precedes marketing, businesses must double the budget in the initial years to include the cost of creating and establishing the brand, and it could well go up to 20%. Most importantly, small businesses have to keep a budget for online marketing, particularly SEO because 51% of traffic to websites has its roots in organic searches. For small businesses that give due emphasis to online marketing, keeping aside 3-4% of the marketing budget for SEO is a good decision.
Since you have to implement SEO for making business gains, you have to know some basic information about it. You need not try to be an expert in SEO but at least learn how it works and how it can become useful for your business. Since you have to shop around to identify a suitable Chicago SEO Company to guide you in SEO matters, you should be conversant in talking about the subject. It would help to locate an SEO company that can do complete justice to your business needs. You have to learn the basics of optimization of websites for search engines, which is fundamental to SEO.
In this article, we will discuss the on-page and off-page SEO optimization so that you know what these terms mean and what aspects of SEO it covers.
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On-Page SEO And Off-Page SEO:
Optimizing the website features to make it conducive to SEO is the true meaning of the word optimization about SEO. On-Page optimization refers to the manipulation of the website features that website owners can undertake while working on the site. It consists of tweaking and adjusting website features to make it compatible for executing specific SEO functions. Beyond the website, several digital signals keep generating that website owners have to deal with to optimize its influence on the SEO campaign. Optimization of these signals that have an indirect effect on SEO is what constitutes Off-Page SEO.
As you can understand, Off-Page SEO is not only different from on-page SEO, but it is also quite challenging to implement. Understanding the different aspects of off-page SEO takes time, and its implementation is not always easy because it takes time and you need to have the patience to get results.
Off-Page Optimization:
You can take actions outside the website that have a direct influence on the prospects of online marketing, and these actions constitute your off-page optimization efforts. The purpose of such optimization is to establish the authority of your website in the industry and at the same time establish the social credibility of your business. Google considers these signals vital because it generates from other websites and it is not possible to manipulate these. The off-page SEO factors include backlinks that the site earns, the social signals surrounding the website and brand mentions.
Understanding Backlinks:
Backlinks are like votes to your website that other websites cast in your favor. Backlinking or acquiring backlinks from other relevant websites is an important off page SEO. When other websites find value in your content, they offer hyperlinks to your websites as they wish to stay connected. It drives more traffic to your site and improves the prospects of crawling by search bots. Backlinks that have the authority and are relevant to your website convey value to the website. Google uses the signal to improve search rankings.
Social Signals:
When your social media connections find the content valuable, it becomes valuable to Google too. If your content receives good mention and sharing on the social media, Google treats it as a positive signal, and it influences the search rankings. Higher is the social sharing of content more is the chances of going up the search rankings. Social sharing generates no-follow links that help to drive more traffic to websites.
Brand Mentions:
When your brand receives mentions through sharing it acquires the same value as happens through citations. For Google, brand mention is critical as is evident from their filing of Google Panda Patent way back in 2012. Therefore, brand mentions become a critical off page SEO factor for which marketers have to work hard.
On-Page SEO:
Whatever changes you can make to the website elements for making it more effective in implementing SEO becomes the on-page optimization initiatives. The purpose of optimization is to make the website more relevant to searches so that it becomes easy for search engines to identify and choose it against specific search queries. From keywords to Meta tags, which include titles, Meta description and images everything becomes very important for on-page optimization. Below you will find some on-page optimization factors.
Page Titles:
Page titles are important as it tells viewers as well as search engines about the content. The website must have the functionality of creating unique page titles because otherwise, the name of the page used at the back end would become the title. The page title determines whether search engines would pick it up and whether users would click on it.
Heading Tags:
Heading tags come second in preference to on-page optimization. Page headings resemble the outline of a newspaper, and it must follow a logical hierarchy with close interconnection between one another. Each web page should have one organized topic with one H1 heading on each page. It provides clarity to search engines to understand what the web page is about and what kind of rank it deserves.
Keywords:
Placing keywords strategically in the content and at other locations of the web page including headings and subheadings is important on-page optimization technique. Besides the above, placing keywords in URLs and image file names and creating attractive Meta descriptions are some other measures in on-page optimization.
About the Author:
Sujain Thomas is a data IT professional who works closely with DBA experts to provide her clients with fantastic solutions to their data problems. If you need data IT solutions, she is the person for the job. She has written this post on the latest SEO updates for website optimization and also mentioned about the Chicago SEO strategy as well.
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