What is Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)?
The sole purpose of having your own website is to have people visit it and learn who you are, what you do, and what you can do for them. There are many reliable ways to jumpstart your traffic flows, though most of them would cost some money.
Search engine optimisation (SEO) is an organised process to improve your organic ranking in the search engine results page (SERP).
Sometimes also referred to as organic search, natural search, or free search, it’s all about where your website falls in the list of search results when someone searches for your product or service.
That premium position near the top of the search has many benefits. When your page ranking increases, you improve your discoverability, and people can find you. With your website being discovered, it resulted in increased traffic and increased brand awareness. The opposite is true when people can’t find you, and you miss out on all that traffic potentials and sales.
How Do the Search Engines Find You in the First Place?
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) has been around for almost as long as the internet has been public. But SEO has changed a great deal since it was first used to stuff with as many keywords as possible into content and fill pages with backlinks. Over time, SEO has become a sophisticated and technical practice highly informed by current web user behaviour. Today’s incarnation uses both on-page and off-page techniques to ensure how relevant your product or services is to what the user is searching for. The key to improving search engine ranking is to ensure your site has all the elements the search engines are looking for to index the page.
On-Page Optimisation Best Practices
On-page Optimisation involves all the on-site techniques you can employ to ensure a webpage will rank on a SERP, and it can also help determine how well that page ranks.
It uses both content and technical elements to improve a page’s quality, so the more on-page Optimisation you do, the more traffic you’ll get to a website and the more relevant that traffic will be.
If you’d like your site to appear at the top lines of search engine results, you must use proper keywords and keyword phrases in your content. Keywords are the glue that holds together your on-page SEO strategy because they can be incorporated into all these technical elements to help the right visitors find you at the right time. To be effective, the keywords must be researched and carefully selected, and they must be worked into content in a natural and seamless way.
Include unique page title and headings for each page on your site. Meta descriptions should expand on title tags, summarise a page’s content and tell visitors why they should read your content instead of somebody else’s.
Ensure all of your images have “image alt” attribute and image files are named appropriately for search engines to crawl your images within your website.
Make sure your URL structure is user friendly and descriptive of the page’s subject. You can also optimise URLs with keywords, so long as they’re relevant.The navigation between the pages on your site should be easy and user-friendly to help visitors navigate your site and make the internal linking easier for search engines to understand your site and index your pages. At the very least, each page on your site should link back to its category or subcategory page and to the homepage.
While the fundamental aspects remain the same, Google has introduced new ranking factors to improve user experience and security feature of a website. Compatibility with mobile devices now directly affects the search rankings. Ensure your site is responsive and can be viewed across all devices: phones, tablets, and laptops. Your site should also be optimised for site speed and make sure it loads quickly and runs smoothly. Google wants a more secure web and your site URL should start with https, especially if you require sensitive information or have e-commerce functions.
Finally, avoid too many broken links as it indicates poor maintenance. Google discriminates neglected or abandoned sites, no matter how great the content they serve may be. Google’s Search Quality Rating Guidelines emphasize the fact that poor maintenance of the website (which is visible through spammy content, broken links, and lack of moderation in the comment section) signals an untrustworthy source of information.
Off-Page Optimisation Best Practices
While On-Page Optimisation focuses on optimising parts of your website that are within your control, Off-Page Optimisation focuses on increasing your domain’s authority through the act of getting links from other websites.
A site that is informative and filled with useful information will be noted, and other sites will link to it. Each of these links is viewed by Google as a “vote” for that site.
As such, creating shareable content is the first step to earning valuable links and improving your Off-Page Optimisation. While backlinks are integral to Off-Page Optimisation, the search engines take into account both the number and quality of your backlinks; quality is much more important than quantity. For example, a single quality backlink from an authoritative site is worth more than ten or even 100 low-quality links.
The Importance of Great Content in Search Engine Optimisation
While the technical aspects are important, one of the most crucial elements of on-page SEO is content because this is what brings traffic to your site.
However, not just any content will do, and today’s web users are looking for relevant, interesting, engaging, and informative content that fills a need.
In other words, people must want to consume the content you’ve created. Write content that people find useful, and it gets shared, spreading your content across Facebook, Twitter, blogs, and other social media. Quality is more important than the quantity of content.
On the other hand, if you have only published a “brochure site”, a website that is a mirror image of an offline introductory brochure about your company, then there will not be much for search engines to put in their database, and you will not get much traffic from search engine queries.
The Power of Search Engine Optimisation
Competition is the hardest part of running a business. When you’re in a market with bigger corporations, it’s hard to compete with them. They have a big name for themselves, which automatically draws people to trust those corporations. Digital marketing is a great opportunity for your business to compete with bigger companies to obtain more relevant leads.
Your business can reach interested leads with the same methods as a larger corporation. Methods like Search Engine Optimisation level the playing field, and your site ranks in the search results based on relevancy. A corporation can’t buy its way to the top of the ranks. They have to optimise their pages just the same as a small mom-and-pop shop.
This creates the opportunity for smaller to mid-size businesses to compete with bigger corporations. If you can create content that is more relevant to the selected keywords than your corporate competitors, no amount of money will enable them to outrank you.
How Does One Get Ahead With Search Engine Optimisation?
No matter how many links you develop or how much off-site content you promote, your website will not perform to its potential without solid on-page Optimisation. On-Page Optimisation is a vital part of any SEO strategy.
However it is a cumbersome and lengthy process, but it’s extremely important and should be a core part of your marketing strategy if you want excellent visibility and quality leads through your website.
Our expert SEO team knows what the search engines look for and will perform a usability audit of your website to discover weak points on on-page factors and report broken links and other mistakes. Usability audit does not necessarily mean revamping the complete website design. It is more about improving the user’s experience and overhauling the website for proper functioning. It is the simplest and most affordable way of determining the overall performance of your website. Our report will provide you with potential reasons as to why you aren’t performing as well as you could.
Google is actively performing hundreds of algorithm updates each year to weed out websites that are optimised to gain a spike of disengaged traffic from its index. Managing and responding to Google Algorithm updates is an integral part of our SEO services. With a depth of understanding of the relationship between SEO services and digital success, we build future-proof Search Engine Optimisation.
Our approach is grounded in best practice SEO techniques, and we work closely with our clients to understand their audiences through keyword research that determines the keywords your audiences are searching for on Google. We develop a bespoke SEO strategy to index your content. When this is done correctly, the Google Algorithm will be working in your favour to index your webpages highly for searches using the keywords that you have built your strategy around to drive long-term, returning, and convertible traffic.