What Is SEO?

Is your website getting traffic?

Ever wondered why when you search google you are presented with the results that you see? Google’s job is to present customers with information. This information that is wanted could be on your website. So how do you get your website presented in front of more of your customers? This is where SEO comes in. 

What is SEO? A term you may have heard countless times. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation. It is the process of optimizing all the factors on and off your website that can affect how it ranks on a search engine. 

SEO can be broken down into 5 categories each affecting the performance of rankings. We will go through these to help simplify them.

1. Technical SEO

Technical SEO focuses on optimizing the technical aspects of a website to improve its ranking on search engines. This includes-

website structure – The way the page hierarchy is set up. Imagine you are building a spiders web of information you want everything linked so it is easy to navigate

crawlability – Search engines use crawlers to check your website, and you have the option of indexing or no index tags and follow/nofollow tags. These tags tell the crawler if they can proceed to check a page or not. 

site speed – There are a few websites to measure this at but the one to use is Google page speed others include GTmetrix 

mobile-friendliness – A whopping 75%+ of most website traffic comes from mobile devices. With this in mind, it is extremely important to make sure your website is mobile-friendly. This includes making sure the text is readable, the buttons are not too close together so they can be pressed easily. 

2. On-page SEO:

On-Page SEO focuses on optimizing the content and HTML source code of individual web pages to improve their relevance and ranking.

This includes:

Keyword research and optimization – Keyword research is critical to the success of any website, Not all keywords are the same. If you are starting a new website you are more likely to rank for low-volume and low-difficulty keywords than you are for high-volume and high-difficulty. Whilst your money page (pillar content) may be full of high-volume and high-difficulty keywords you would use low-volume and low-difficulty to assist in gaining authority across the site. If you have a website that has got high authority you could go straight after the high-difficulty ones. Keywords are also clustered so you may have pages that rank for multiple keywords.

Meta tags – Meta tags are brief snippets of descriptive text that google shows to users in the search results 

The Orange is the Meta tag Title and the purple is the Meta tag description.

Header tags – Also known or referred to as H1,H2,H3,H4,H5,H6. Each webpage should only have one H1 tag, This is the main keyword chosen for the page, the other tags would be used through the sections for long-tail keyword variations example if we stick with 8bit beyond from the serp their heading tags are as follows.

You can see that the other keywords on this page in the Heading tags are all variations that stem from their main Keyword selection.

Content optimization – To rank well you need great content, but not just waffle. There should be a structure to your content, in the same way as this page is set up. The content is laid out to help users understand what SEO is. The Summary statement at the start of this page gives a very brief answer. But anyone asking that question in the first place they will want more detail on the topic. This is the reason I have chosen to break it down piece by piece. There are many types of software on the market to do this for you that will give great guidance on what factors other websites are using to rank for a keyword. These will help you to optimise your content better. The downside of this is that they can be expensive, and take a lot of time to understand well and implement. If you have lots of time and some money to pay for the software then it is a great option when starting off. We spend thousands of pounds per month on software, but we can justify that cost as we are dealing with lots of clients who we use that software to analyze data for. If you are on your own then this is just not feasible. 

3. Off-Page SEO

Off-page SEO focuses on optimizing factors outside of the website that impacts its ranking, such as backlinks from other websites and social media signals.

Backlinks – A backlink is a link from another website to yours. It can be viewed as a vote of confidence in the content you have written. Each backlink passes on power so the greater the power of the website giving you the link the greater the power it gives your site. You may see this power referred to as link juice or link equity. One link from a high-authority domain can give more power than 1000 ones with poor authority. This is why it is not a good idea to buy links on fiverr where you are being offered lots of them cheaply. There are a number of methods to get backlinks that we will cover.

Social media signals – Strong social profiles can give you a quick and easy way to get a message out to your followers. When you post people can Like, Share, the post. This can generate traffic to your website free of charge, from people interested in the story you have posted. These things generate social signals to google showing them how popular your business is. Popularity can give you better rankings. We have Some Social Media Marketing Tips

4. Local SEO:

Local SEO focuses on optimizing a website to rank for local search queries and show up in Google Maps and local search results. This includes optimizing for Google Business Profile (formerly known as GMB or Google My Business) and local citations (Directory listings). Your Google Business Profile is free and often extremely underrated by many local businesses often with them not realising how much traffic and how many interactions originate from here. It can be a quick way to build local traffic and boost your business inquiries.

5. Content Marketing:

Content Marketing focuses on creating and promoting high-quality, relevant, and valuable content to attract and retain a target audience and earn backlinks. An example of this for us is our free SEO report We would target website owners. This is because they would find value in it, if you didn’t have your own website then it would not be of use to you. Once website owners found us then there is a likely hood that they would find value in the simplicity of our guides if they wanted to work on their own websites to make them better, or they may find value in our services. 

What is SEO Summary

These sections work together to create a comprehensive SEO strategy that aims to improve the visibility and ranking of a website on search engines. We will cover in more detail different steps to simplify it for our readers. We hope you have enjoyed the read and if you have any questions please feel free to contact us! You may want to complete all these tasks yourself if like many others you don’t have the time you could use our SEO Services and we will do the work for you.