Search engine optimisation is a strategy to make your business or organisation’s website more visible in Yahoo, Bing or Google search engines.
It’s essential for online marketers because it helps you get more visitors and generate more business from your site.
What is SEO (search engine optimisation)?
People search online, like Google or Yahoo, to find relevant information—whether it’s a question they have or something they want to buy.
There are over 1 billion daily searches on Google alone. That’s a lot of potential customers!
Search engine optimisation is about visibility.
It’s not a quick fix. It’s not a magic bullet. It’s a long-term strategy that involves tweaking small things on your site and making changes to your website content over time, often years at a time — but these little tweaks significantly improve your traffic over time!
SEO can be complicated, but there are several simple things you can do
Search engine optimisation covers a wide range of factors, including keywords; links from other sites; social media activity; design of the site etc.
However, some people need to correct the mistake of linking out too much from their articles. This can hurt their rankings with Google. It’s always good practice to keep your links relevant so they don’t distract from the topic or seem spammy!
How do search engines like Google or Yahoo, or Bing work?
Search engines crawl the Web to retrieve information. The first thing they do is index all of the pages on the internet—that’s what makes them searchable.
Then, when you enter a query in the search bar, they compare it to their index of every page on the internet and return results that match your query.
It calculates how relevant the results are to your question. The more relevant your web content is to the user, the higher your ranking in search results.
Search engines use a mathematical algorithm to calculate page rankings, but this mathematical formula is private (at least not many people know it). However, based on our research, a lot of experts believe that three key factors determine how well some web pages rank:
Keywords
Keywords are words or phrases people might type into search engines for information on a particular topic of interest. For example, if you were searching for information about how search engines work, you might type “how” and “search engine.” When someone types those two terms into Google’s search field at once (without quotes), Google will display results that include those two terms in their content (title tags/headlines) or links pointing toward those pages from other sites across the Web.
Links
Sites with many links pointing to them are considered more trustworthy than those with fewer links pointing to them.
Content
The content of a page can be analysed by looking at its text and images to determine whether it is likely to be helpful to someone searching for something related to that page’s topic area. Content analysis is performed by analysing what words appear most often within each document and which documents link.
You can use online or software tools to monitor your SEO and track how you’re SEO efforts are doing.
Some of these tools include:
Google Analytics
Google Analytics can track how people interact with your organisation or company website.
It helps you to:
- Understand how users get to your site,
- what they do while on it,
- and how they leave. What is the last page they’ve been on before leaving your site?
GA is free to use.
You can use GA, as it is customarily called, to measure the number of visits, unique visitors, pages visited, bounce rate, conversions (including purchases), where people are located (based on their IP addresses), and much more.
Google Search Console
Google Search Console (or GSC for short) is a free service that allows you to monitor your website’s SEO.
Google Search Console helps you understand how Google visits and interacts with your site. It enables you to identify crawl errors, find new pages to add to your site and see which keywords people are using to find your site.
You can also view your website’s performance in the search results using Google Search Console, including website impressions and user clicks. It also shows click-through rates.
Other uses of Google Search Console are:
– View how and where your site appears in search results.
– Track performance over time and compare it with other sites.
– Check for problems that might affect user experience or SEO optimisation.
Ahrefs
Ahrefs is a web-based platform designed to help businesses and individuals to monitor their online presence, track rankings and identify growth opportunities.
It provides several tools to monitor your website’s rank for different keywords, analyse your competitors’ performance and track backlinks.
Ahrefs is a paid tool.
Moz
Moz is a software company that provides website analytics, tools and data to help marketers improve their advertising campaigns. Moz’s products include Moz Pro, a keyword research tool that helps marketers find keywords and identify opportunities for optimisation; Moz Local, which allows local businesses to optimise their listings on Google; and Followerwonk, a tool for social media analysis.
Moz is paid tool
SEMrush
SEMrush is a powerful and flexible digital marketing suite that lets you manage large-scale SEO and paid advertising campaigns with an easy-to-use interface and reporting dashboard.
Using SEMrush, you can analyse your competitors’ strategies and uncover new opportunities to improve performance. You can also use it to research keywords, monitor your website traffic, track keywords as they progress in the search engines and identify the best-performing content for social media.
SEMrush combines the power of a traditional SEO tool with the convenience of a modern-day keyword research tool. It gives you access to data on your competitors’ efforts, from organic listings to paid ads, giving you all the website performance information you need to make informed decisions about optimising your site content.
SEMrush is a paid tool.
On-page SEO
Off-page SEO
Off-page SEO optimises your website for search engines, including building backlinks to your site. It’s often called “link building” because links from other locations significantly determine how well your website ranks on search engines.
It’s essential to ensure that your site’s content is valuable and exciting so that people will want to link it. You furthermore want to provide the correct & unbroken links on your site.
The term “off-page” refers to this kind of search engine optimisation taking place away from the optimised page rather than on that page.
Technical SEO
It’s also called “back end” or “under the hood” SEO because it’s what happens behind the scenes on your website. Technical SEO usually involves making small, incremental changes to your site to improve its performance and make it more user-friendly.
SEO is not advertising
Conversely, advertising is a short-term strategy where you pay money to get your site seen by more people. You can buy ads like Google Ads or Bing Ads on search engines or other websites.
SEO Best Practices
Here are some search engine optimisation best practices you can start today.
The number of quality website links pointing to a page.
One of the essential SEO metrics is the amount and calibre of links pointing to a page. The more, the better, but it’s also necessary to consider the type of link. For example, a link from an authoritative website holds more weight and authority than a blog with low domain authority.
The text content on the page
The text content on the page should be optimised for search engines. You need to overdo putting in keywords and make it keyword-stuffed. Google analyses and penalises pages with too many keywords to manipulate search rankings.
Instead, focus on creating a narrative about your company to help visitors understand what you do. Add keywords that naturally fit your text, but don’t stuff them in or overdo them.
- The text content on the page should be appropriately written with correct grammar in a natural tone.
- The website pages or posts should be relevant to the site’s main topic.
- The image and text content should be unique, not plagiarised, and well-referenced.
- The content should be well-organised. The content structure should have a logical flow.
- The content should not be too long (you don’t want to overwhelm your readers) or too short (you want your readers to find what they’re looking for easily)
The freshness of the content on the page
The freshness of the content is a significant factor in search engine optimisation.
If you have a blog full of outdated posts, it will be hard for people to find you. Fresh content will help keep people coming back to your site and help Google understand what your site is about.
It’s essential for several reasons, but mainly because Google can’t crawl your pages if they’re too old. You must publish fresh content regularly to rank well in Yahoo, Bing, and Google.
You can tell when a page needs to be fresh by looking at the time stamp on the page. If it says something like “updated: July 29th, 2015”, then you know that it hasn’t been updated in over six years and probably won’t be appropriately indexed by Google.
When you have a blog, post new material on it regularly to keep your readers engaged. If you don’t have a blog, research, find a blog niche and consider getting one started!
Your blog can also be an opportunity to get more website user traffic from search engines like Google or Bing by writing informative articles that answer common questions about your industry or niche.
In Summary
A search engine-friendly site and relevant, original content are essential for any website. However, there are many more ways to improve your SEO, so we’d recommend diving into the wealth of information on the topic; understanding SEO is a great way to enhance your digital marketing too!