What is SEO?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation and is essentially improving a website in order to increase the visibility of the page when searched through a search engine, such as Google and Bing.
By ranking higher on a SERP (Search Engine Results Page), the website attracts more customers organically, because over 75% of searches start on Google so SEO is the easiest way to generate potential leads for your business. SEO is the most prominent way to go about digital marketing in today’s age because it is not possible to pay search engines to obtain higher organic search rankings.
As a business with a new website, it is important to employ an SEO strategy to increase engagement and traffic on your page. In this post, we’ll tell you more about how SEO works and how you can improve your website’s rankings on SERPs.
How does SEO work? Search engines like Google and Bing use bots to crawl all the web pages on the internet, which collect information about these pages. Using this information, the search engines can put the sites in an index, like a library. Specialised algorithms then analyse these pages and, accounting for ranking factors, determine the order in which they should appear on SERPs.
Results pages prioritise paid advertisements at the top of the page, then all other results are organic and based on ranking factors.
These search engine bots take into account the quality of your online content, such as how directed the information is in response to a search engine query, and the quantity of content: how consistently content is posted.
The best way to employ an effective SEO strategy is to take your online content and optimise it. We will discuss how you can do this later on.
SEO includes on-page SEO and off-page SEO. On-page SEO involves building content on your website to improve its rankings. Selecting the use of certain keywords in regularly produced high-quality content that is well-written is the main SEO strategy.
Off-page SEO involves earning backlinks and building relationships between pages to create content people want to share. Off-page SEO builds links between different pages and identifies your site as a recommendation for answering search engine queries.
As SEO cannot be achieved by purchasing advertisements and is a relatively ‘free’ process, it requires hard work from your website designer to improve organic ratings on SERPs. Consequently, there are also incorrect ways of optimising your website, known as black hat SEO.
These are sneaky tactics that will achieve short-term optimisation but can ultimately lead to penalisation and blacklisting from search engines.
Tactics involve keyword stuffing, duplicating content, invisible text and link scrapping. This may initially lead to a higher ranking because the bots regard your website as the best option for internet users.
However, with time, these bots will recognise that activity on your website is not answering users’ queries and your site will be penalised. On the contrary, white hat SEO is the safest way of improving SEO over a longer period of time.
This involves producing relevant content and links, well-labelled images, standards-compliant HTML, unique page titles and complete sentences with good spelling and grammar.
White hat SEO is a better response to your human audience, by ensuring that your website answers the user’s query that they have input into the search engine.
Now that you are more familiar with how SEO works, let’s take a look at how you can employ some of these strategies in your own website build and maintain higher rankings on SERPs.
The most important factor when improving SEO is the relevancy of your content. When an internet user types a query into a search engine, they would like to be provided with a website that is relevant and will provide them with a solution.
High-quality content ensures that your website gives the user a solution. It is important when developing a website to understand the intent of this internet user so that their query is solved directly. The use of relevant keywords ensures that your website will appear for the correct queries.
Your content must also remain fresh: the regular production of relevant content will ensure that your website appears consistent and active. In order to understand what makes your content relevant and which keywords to use, competition analysis is vital. Take a look at websites likely to be similar to your own and identify the keywords that these sites use.
The bots that search engines use also have a semantic understanding, meaning that they can link similarly-meaning words to one another, improving your rankings.
The bounce rate of your website will be acknowledged when establishing a ranking, referring to the rate at which users visit your site and leave it almost immediately. Therefore, content must be relevant and immediately engaging to encourage site visitors to remain on your page.
Although HTML seems daunting and unappealing, understanding it entirely is not essential for SEO. It is the simple parts of HTML that will improve your rankings. For example, your title tags – the blue website titles appearing on SERPs – must be relevant and sophisticated. Similarly, the meta-description shown below the title tags has to provide the internet user with a succinct and precise description of your website.
Any schema that is used below the title tags such as star ratings, can also improve rankings as long as they function well. The H1 on your website pages is the primary header, and this must also be relevant to the content you are displaying and well-written.
Many developers overlook the effectiveness of alt text, that is the text describing any images shown on your site. This is a good opportunity to include keywords. The URL slug is the text added to the basic URL of your website.
The URL slug of the page you are on now is shown in bold as: https://orangedotmedia.co.uk/what-is-seo/. When direct and succinct, this helps the website to both seem sophisticated and inform the user exactly what will appear on the page they are visiting by using keywords.
The architecture of your website will also impact its ranking on SERPs. During development, it is paramount to ensure that the site is fast loading, mobile-friendly and has a safe connection.
The search engine bots will take this into account when establishing rankings. Canonical issues must also be avoided during website development, such as one or more URLs displaying similar or duplicate content. This particular example is known as content syndication and can involve original content being reposted on two different domains. The bots will favour those sites with unbroken links and a sitemap that can be easily navigated.
SEO also relies on how much these search engine bots ‘trust’ your website. This is established over time, so it is important to view SEO as a long-term investment that will hopefully improve with time if done right, rather than a simple quick fix.
Trust is established with domain and page authority, meaning whether your site can be trusted to answer queries directly and provide the most up-to-date information. For example, https://www.coca-cola.co.uk/ has the most domain and page authority when answering queries surrounding Coca-Cola because it is so widely known and visited.
Once again, trust is established with time and consistency, so the only active way of improving it is to produce consistent, relevant content frequently. Incorporating social aspects into your website, such as links to social media platforms increases shares and will also improve your rankings.
There is a plethora of information available online about Search Engine Optimisation. At Orangedot Media, we provide monthly packages to maintain optimisation of your website by taking care of the technicalities for you.
There are many factors to consider when attempting to improve your organic rankings on SERPs, so hiring a website designer is the best option to ensure that white hat SEO is carried out effectively. Contact us today to learn more about the SEO monthly packages we offer.
