SEO in 2019: Basics and beyond
Since the beginning of the internet, there have been tricks and tips to get your website highest on organic search pages. Much like the old-school phonebooks, where businesses learned that just by adding a few extra “A’s” to the front of their name, they could boost their visibility without shelling out the extra bucks for advertising, there are also ways to leapfrog your website’s accessibility today by using “search engine optimization,” or “SEO.”

Without SEO, you can have the best website in the world, but no matter how long someone searches for it, with however many combinations of keywords, they may never find it.

Fortunately, most web design packages now make the SEO part of your website readily accessible, so you no longer need a degree in computer science for your site to compete. But this means you also don’t have the excuse to outsource it, either. Time to clean up those skills.

The basics

Since Google is responsible for more than 65 percent of search engine market share in the U.S. and over 92 percent worldwide, we are mostly going to be talking about SEO for Google. http://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share 

Google is always tweaking how it ranks pages, but its main goals are to highly rank pages that:
•	Contain high-quality, relevant information
•	Have relevance to the search topic
•	Are of “High Quality,” determined by the number and pedigree of the sites that link to your page and your site

Google is also looking to see:
•	How long people stay on your site after they click
•	How much unique content you have

Keywords, keywords, keywords

Keywords are the core of SEO. Keywords are the terms that people are searching for when they go to a search engine. “Punxsutawney School District” is an example of a keyword. “Punxsutawney” is also a keyword. 

But what you really want to know is, will your school district show up for the keywords “best school district in western PA”? And that is where SEO comes in. It’s also where LSI keywords come in. Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) keywords are “conceptually related terms” that search engines use to understand content on a page. It means that whereas once upon a time you could write “best school district in Western PA” on every page of your website, easily ensuring that Google would rank you highly for those keywords, now Google expects to see additional LSI keywords appearing on your page that relate to being the best school district, keywords like “top-ranked colleges,” “test scores,” “small class size,” and “parent involvement.” In other words, the old adage about content is true.

“Content is king”

This is a phrase that has tumbled around social media for years, but now it’s more relevant than ever. While Google used to crawl websites for keywords and rank your site highly if the keyword in your headline showed up in your article and in your HTML link, Google is a lot smarter now. Today, in-depth content is what ranks best. That ideally means content that is at least 2,000 words and is informational and authoritative, and contains those LSI keywords we talked about.

The dirt on backlinks

“Backlinks take place across the internet when one website mentions another website and links to it. Also referred to as “incoming links,” backlinks make their connection through external websites. These links from outside domains point to pages on your own domain. Whenever backlinks occur, it is like receiving a vote for a webpage. The more votes you get from the authoritative sites creates a positive effect on a site’s ranking and search visibility.” Learn more: www.seoclarity.net/resources/knowledgebase/what-are-backlinks-and-how-do-they-work 

Backlinks are a strong signal to search engines that your site is an authority and should be ranked highly. But they’re also fading in usage, especially in comparison with the links and brand recognition created via social media hashtags and mentions.

Social media!

That’s right — search engines are using social media to judge the quality of your site, but maybe not how you think. It isn’t how many times you share something from your website onto Facebook or Twitter that affects Google’s ranking — that would be too easy, right? It’s that the more times you can get people to click on the link that heads back to your site, the greater your search engine ranking will be. In other words, it’s still all about providing good content. https://blog.hootsuite.com/social-media-seo-experiment/ 

One more thing you should know

In 2018, Google started the process of “migrating sites to a mobile-first index.” The mobile version of your site is now the primary one that Google is using to rank your site. This means if you’ve procrastinated on making a mobile version of your website — that time is past! Mobile is the way of the present and the future. https://searchengineland.com/5-seo-trends-that-will-matter-most-in-2019-307641 

SEO can make or break your site. But with good content and engagement, and an SEO strategy that takes LSI keywords into account, you can come out on top.

Contributed by Megan J. Wilson, Los Angeles-based freelance writer and communications consultant.