A Beginners Guide to SEO
What is Search engine optimisation, and why is it important for your business?
SEO or Search Engine Optimisation is essentially the act of optimizing your content and website to appeal more to Search engine ‘crawlers’ – We will discuss these later on. In order for your website to appear at a higher rank.
How Do Search Engines determine rank?
In order for Google or Bing and other Search Engines to ensure that users such as yourself have a good experience and have relevant information delivered to them, Search engines use Algorithms known as ‘Crawlers’. These Crawlers index each and every website on the internet and give them a ranking. This ranking is based on Hundreds of factors and these are constantly changing. That’s what makes SEO challenging! The main ones include;
- Page Speed (Time is taken to load speed)
- Relevant and Optimized Content
- Secure Website (SSL Certificate)
- Outgoing and Inbound links (Outbound links refer to links from your website going to other websites. And inbound links refers to links in your website leading to other parts of your website)
- Mobile Friendliness
- Social Signals
Keyword Research
Now that you have a basic understanding of What SEO is and Why it’s important, now you need to learn how to show up in search results and what keywords others are using. Let’s find out how to make relevant content that satisfies both search engines and users.
As a start do you know your target audience? If you don’t there might be some trouble in determining what content to write. So first things first
- Determine your target audience
And then do some research on
- What is your target audience searching for?
- Is it a large number of people searching for it?
- How do they want that information delivered to them?
- When are people searching for these terms
- How are people searching for these terms (phones etc.)
- Who are your customers, what demographic are you targeting
- Where are your customers, what geographic locations are you targeting.
You must have answers to all these questions before you even start SEO.
To begin your research, there are multiple free or paid keyword research tools you can use such as; Moz.
On-Site Optimisation
On-Site SEO involves making sure your websites titles, meta descriptions, content, tags are optimised for the keywords you have chosen to target. You must start basing your content on your website based around the keyword that your customers are using. On-site Optimisation is quite straightforward just takes a little bit of time and involves little effort after it is done.
Off-site Optimisation
Off-site Optimization is a little bit harder and needs ongoing effort and attention. Offsite involves using other sites to link back to your site. This indicates to Crawlers that your website has good content. Basically
‘If a lot of websites want to link to your site, then your site must have good content’
The ways to generate authentic and quality backlinks to your website is first to do regular press releases, this will give you immediate backlinks from reputable and highly respected websites improving your offsite SEO. Another method would be to write guest blogs for other reputable websites. However the content you write must be useful to users and make it link back to your website further driving traffic to your website.
Summary
Overall SEO is quite important and very tricky, this blog was just a very brief summary of the intensive world of SEO and often proper and well-done SEO can take weeks and is an ongoing process. However, the results it can deliver is almost unrivalled and can help to generate you leads and drive traffic to your website. And unlike other marketing, the results of SEO are often still seen after the campaign is over. If you’re interested in this topic I encourage you to speak to one of our specialists they’re more than happy to speak to anyone about their niche and to read further into applications of this Knowledge.
