When it comes to SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) many people believe that it is a difficult skill to learn. On paper, SEO looks complicated and not a very easy skill to master. If you can master the basics, it becomes easier, and you will be more at ease with the harder aspects of SEO. There will be times when you will have to get in an expert to help with the more difficult aspects but that shouldn’t stop you from getting to grips with the basics.
So, let us take a look at getting the basics right.
Question: What Is SEO?
SEO put into simple terms, is the process of improving the visibility of your website when people on search engines like Google put a search term into the search bar when they are searching for products, services or information. The better your SEO, the better are the chances of your website gaining traffic (visitors to your website).
How Does SEO Work Then?
Google as an example, use things called bots. These search webpages on the internet gaining and collecting information from website to website. Then they place all that information into an index (a library) to help people searching the pages find the information or product or service they require. Google uses an algorithm that will analyse all the pages it has crawled. Then rank the pages in order and how they should appear depending on the search term a person is searching for.
Successful SEO factors include how well a website or page when crawled can give the desired information a search term is searching for.
But you can’t, unfortunately, pay Google as an example to get your website or page higher in the rankings than your competitors, so this is why you hire an SEO expert to do the harder aspects of SEO for you rather like us here at The Search Equation
So Why Has SEO Become an Important Part Of Any Digital Marketing Strategy?
SEO has now become an integral part of any digital marketing strategy. A countless number of searches are through search engines like Google. If you can even learn the basics, you can improve your website or page ranking even by a little. Website or page searches are becoming a more integral part of any marketing strategy. SEO comes in to help visibility and turn that visibility into purchases! When you can have a basic understanding of what your customers are looking for with the help of SEO you can improve your website on those results.
How Easy Then Is It To Learn SEO?
The basics of SEO are the easiest to learn. But when it comes to more advanced SEO practices you need to get in an expert. So let us take a look at the basics.
The Components
Google will base its search results on two things these are relevance (does the content match the search query) and authority (is the content trustworthy). SEO bases itself on two factors below
Keyword Targeting
Keyword targeting is the phrase or keywords used to describe your brand or are the most relevant in describing your brand. These are the most likely to be the search term that potential customers will use, to search for your brand. This will bring the highest amount of traffic to your site with the minimum of effort. It is simple to put a list together of keywords together. Keyword tools such as Keysearch can help but always keep on top of it as the keyword phrasings are forever changing as it can get harder to find the right long-form keywording if you are not updating your site and keyword search.
On-site Optimisation
On-site optimisation makes sure that your website or page can clearly be seen by search engines and indexed by them accordingly and appropriately. This can include title tags (HTML code tag that allows you to give a web page a title) and meta description (an HTML element that describes and summarises the contents of your page for the benefit of users and search engines). Keywords and high-quality website content are imperative. It can get technical but get the basics of this right then the expert can take over.
Ongoing Content
This means producing UpToDate articles, blogs, video content, images and making sure your website is fresh and refreshed to entice users to visit and return to your site. Keep your content well written, informative, and interesting as this will increase the authority of your site (otherwise known as Page Authority (PA). This is the score developed by Moz that predicts how well a specific page will rank on a search engine result page (SERP). These scores range from 1 to 100, with the higher the score the greater the ability to rank.)
Off-site Content, Backlinks and Link Building
Link building is a very often underused aspect of SEO. It is a necessity and should be an integral part of any SEO strategy. It’s a simple aspect of SEO by linking to an offsite page or post or posting your content on a high authority (The higher the rank, the higher a website’s authority) website. This can increase your website’s trustworthiness. These are often known as backlinks when one website links to another website.
If You Want Your Website To Keep Growing
Effort -Result-Strategy
You have to look at the amount of effort you have put into your website, pit them against the results your website is achieving and then look at ways of improving your strategy to improve on or get better results than you may be achieving. You have to keep on top of your SEO as it it a forever changing landscape.
We here at The Search Equation talk to you in simple plain English. No hype, no waffle, no jargon. The bottom line is that your website needs traffic. We generate more enquiries, then you make more sales and increase your revenue. Simple. So if you’re looking for that extra help with your SEO strategy drop us a line and let us help you!
