What is SEO?
What is SEO and why does my website need it?
Search Engine Optimisation is a set of methods to help improve the quality and quantity of website traffic to a website from the major search engines.
By doing SEO on your website you are taking steps to help your business, or more correctly, your business website content rank higher on Google, Bing etc for organic searches.
SEO is targetted towards unpaid traffic rather than direct or paid traffic to your website. The unpaid listings in a search engine results page (SERP) are web pages that the search engine has calculated are the most relevant to the search term the user has entered.
How does SEO work?
Bing, Google and other search enginers use crawlers, also known as bots or spiders, to collect information about the website content.
This process starts from a known web page and follows internal links to pages within that website. It also follows external links to other websites.
The content on these webpages, plus the context of the web links followed, helps the search engine crawler understand what each page is about.
This is then used to see how it’s connected to all of the other web pages within the search engine’s database.
When someone types into the search engine, the search engine displays what it thinks to be the most useful list of results for that search query. The query that the user types in is known as keyword(s). The results that are shown for a search are known as SERP’s or Search Engine Results Page
There are many elements that go into the algorithms that the search engines use, and these are always evolvingto keep pace with user behavior and advances in technology.
How do I do SEO on my website ?
There are many different areas of SEO you should know about. To try and keep it simple, here are some SEO basics.
1. On-page SEO
There are items on your website content that you should be able to control, like the page titles and meta descriptions. These SEO items are displayed in the search engine results.
2. Keywords
Whenever you write content for your site, you should be using keywords in that website content. Keywords should be included in page title tags as well as meta descriptions you write.
What do keywords do? By using keywords, the search engines get an idea of what your page is about. Keywords should be used naturally in your writing, to avoid “keyword stuffing” which could harm your site search results.
How do you research what keywords to use?
Researching keywords isn’t as hard as you may think. There are a lot of tools out there that offer keyword suggestions as well as indicators about how hard it is to get ranked for those keywords.
You can look at related keyword searches on Google, or just watch what Google suggests as you type in a search or you can use a tool like the Hightrees DIY SEO portal to analyse keywords, do keyword research and more
3. Off-page SEO
The next item to look at is getting other people to link to your website content.
Having links from other reputable websites helps make your website look good to search engines, and hopefully gives your business a boost in the rankings.
Getting people to link to your website content does need time and dedication. You need to make website content that people will want to share. If you write blog-style posts or have some promotional videos, you’re starting the right way.
Using social media to promote your content is also a good way to start. The more people that are exposed to your content, you help increase the chances of getting them to link to your web page.
Local SEO
If you have a physical location for your business or would like customers in your area to find you, you’ll want to look at local SEO.
Local SEO helps people, in the area, find your business, when they’re searching for something your business offers.
You may come across the term NAP if you are researching Local SEO. This stands for Name, Address, and Phone number. You need to ensure that your NAP Business details are correct and consistent. Double-check your social media profiles, your web contact details etc. to make sure that all the NAP details are correct.