What is SEO? - Understanding Search Engine Optimisation

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation. It's the process of optimising your website to increase its organic visibility to search engines such as Google and Bing.

The optimisations are designed to help your website rank higher in a search engine's results page (SERP) and thus increase clicks.

SEO is different to PPC (pay-per-click) - the latter being a digital marketing avenue which requires advertisers to bid on keywords and phrases.

Contents

• Why SEO is important

• The 3 Pillars of SEO

• On-Page

• Off-Page

• Technical

• Closing Comments

Why is SEO Important?

Google processes over 40,000 search queries per second, with around 15% of searches having never been searched before. This makes organic search optimisation pivotal for your growth strategy. SEO helps online publishers to appear more predominantly within a SERP (search engine results page), improving visibility, click-through rates and traffic.

The dawn of organic search optimisation saw typically "black-hat" (dodgy) SEO practices being employed in an attempt to gain traffic, however Google regularly releases updates punishing such tactics. Today, quality guidelines and SEO best practices are at the forefront of optimisation, with Google pushing for "helpful, reliable, people-first content". As such, SEOs will normally look to optimise a website for keywords that are relevant and useful to your business and audience.

The 3 pillars of SEO

Search Engine Optimisation is typically viewed as having 3 main categories; on-page, off-page and technical SEO. Websites can also be optimised for the likes of local SEO, international SEO, and now even SEO for AI, but let's dig in to the basics of the 3 pillars of SEO.

On-Page SEO

The key to on-page SEO optimisation is in the name. On-page SEO focuses on optimisation of on-page factors such as content, headings, anchor text (the text used to link to a page), internal links and more. Google continuously reminds us of how important it is to create "people-first content", ie content that's relevant and useful.

Google: "Google’s ranking systems are designed to... present the most relevant, useful results in a fraction of a second."

SEOs will often work together with content teams on a dual content strategy to re-optimise and improve poor-performing content and find create new content which targets missed ranking opportunities. When creating content, aside from making it relevant and useful, there are additional steps you can take to help it to rank well for target keywords:

• Optimise your page's URL.

• Use target keywords in headings and meta-data (for the preview which shows up in Google).

• Add related keywords within the page's wider content.

• Use headings, sub-headings and lists to order and organise your content and make it easier to read.

• Optimise any images - ensure they're not too heavy, and that the file names and alt text (this describes the image) are relevant.

• Include relevant internal links to- and from your page.

• Link out to other websites.

Off-Page SEO

Whilst on-page SEO refers to what can be done on a page, off-page SEO refers to off-website SEO techniques employed to increase rankings. This generally includes link-building activities and social media efforts. Off-page SEO aims to indicate to web visitors and search engines that content is authoritative and trustworthy.

Black-hat off-page SEO techniques include the likes of link farms (usually a collection of websites which exist purely for the purpose of link building) and purchasing links. The latter excludes instances such as purchasing links for PR or sponsored posts, as we are able to inform Google that a link is sponsored with a relevant tag.

Google: "Any links that are intended to manipulate rankings in Google Search results may be considered link spam."

Good off-page SEO can be difficult to achieve as it's something that you don't directly have control over, however there are multiple methods you can use to capture high-quality backlinks to your website. This includes creating content relevant to your target audience, which can be informational, expert, or unique to your site.

Below are some methods you can employ to naturally acquire backlinks:

• Create content with infographics: Infographics naturally gain a lot of backlinks

• Search out Top / Best Content: Content which ranks products or services can be a great source of backlinks and traffic for your site. Search for blogs which rank products or services such as your own, and pitch to them as to why your website fits within their article and what you can offer.

• Offer a free tool: Useful tools are a great way to gain links as well as to bring traffic to your site. Think calculators (calorie deficit calculators, tax calculators), maps, AI-tools such as image designers, online budgets and so on.

Technical SEO

We've delved into on- and off-page SEO but what is Technical SEO? This involves optimisation of the technical aspects of your website to help with content discovery and to improve rankings. The idea is to ensure your website is easy for search engines to crawl (so they can find all of the pages you want them to locate), make sure that nothing is broken and that website visitors can access your content, and to optimise performance factors such as speed - nobody likes slow-loading pages.

Some of the most important tasks in this regard are:

• Submitting your sitemap to Google

• Implementing your robots.txt file

• Optimising your website's speed

• Ensuring your site is mobile-friendly

• Optimising your site structure: Fixing broken links, ensuring content is easy to find and has enough internal links etc

You can utilise a numver of free Google tools, such as Google Search Console and PageSpeed Insights to review user experience on your website.

Closing Comments

This is only a very brief look into the world of SEO, with ground knowledge of best practices. My hope is that this article has somewhat de-mistified SEO and made it more accessible to you and your business.