SEO - What Is It And Why Does It Matter?
SEO. Three little letters that seem to pop up everywhere at the moment. Everyone talks about them but so few people know what they stand for, what they really mean or why they are so important. So, welcome to the ultimate guide to everything SEO.
First things first, what do the letters actually stand for? This is the easy bit, SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. Now, you may be scratching your head thinking “great, but what does that really mean?”. Well, let’s unwrap it a little bit to make some sense of what SEO actually is.
What actually is SEO? In a nutshell SEO is the process of improving your website or webpage in order to make it more attractive to a search engine. It means going over everything you’ve written, what you’ve said, how you’ve said it, key words and phrases you’ve used, how often you’ve repeated yourself, checking that your site is easy to navigate, how many clicks does it take to reach the content, do you have videos, social media, blog posts… I could go on. Sounds like a lot of work? Before we break it down further, let’s clarify what search engines are looking for and how your SEO affects them.
What do search engines actually do? Search engines only want one thing; they want to provide the best websites in response to someone’s request. When you search for something, they scan the millions of websites that exist to find the best, most user-friendly, up-to-date engaging websites about whatever you searched for. How do they know which sites are best? They look for all things we mentioned above. If they aren’t sure what your site is about, or they don’t think it’s easy to use, or they find a site with more information and better pictures and graphs, they will put that site on page one of the results and your site will appear on page two or three. Make sense? Now obviously, you want to be on page one, you know SEO can help, but what can you actually do now?
How do I start optimizing my SEO? One of the key things search engines are looking for is freshness. Is your site updated regularly? This doesn’t always mean adding new content, sometimes this can be going back to update old content, add a new paragraph, respond to comments, correct existing mistakes. Or you could add a video, images and infographics or maybe adding an attached downloadable document, or adding a new blog post. Search engines love new engaging content so although all this takes time to create, it’s worth taking the time to do it right and ensure that you are keeping the visitors coming. So, you’ve started using key phrases, you’re going back over old content and planning new updates. What else can you be doing to keep those search engines interested in your site?
It’s not just about what you’ve written. As well as considering what is on your site, you need to consider how it is on your site. Making a clearly structured, easy-to-read website is a sure-fire way to improve your SEO. Use headings and subheadings, tag blog posts, link clearly and directly between pages, make sure your site is optimized to be used on a mobile device and give all your images names and descriptions. All these things help to make it easy for a search engine to trust and promote you.
Be beware . . . Search engines will penalise you if you just slap your key words and phrases all over your site with little thought as to the actual content. This is call over-optimization and will result in you dropping down the rankings. Think about how often you are using certain phrases and make sure you are using them in interesting ways. Using your key phrase in your website description, in a main heading, a subheading, an internal link and the content of a few pages is great but avoid using it on every other line. Some sites try to trick search engines into getting higher rankings by over using key words and putting links to their page on other popular sites and while this can work in the short term, in the long run the big companies which own the main search engines such as Google and Microsoft will catch on to what you are doing and banish you from the first page forever. So, while it’s tempting to try and get around the rules of SEO, it’s better for you to get it right and play the long game.
Finally, some things you can’t control. Or at least, you can’t fully control them. You may hear people talking about “off-page” SEO, this is exactly what it sounds like, things which affect your SEO but are not on your webpage. This means things like people sharing your content, including links to your site on their page, social media shares. All of these things will help search engines to trust your site but all of these things rely on other people visiting and loving your site. So, what’s the best way to control this? Make sure your content is well-written, information and enjoyable to read. People share what they love so the more loveable your site is, the more people will share it, link it and tell others thereby giving search engines the go-ahead to trust your site.
Feel like you’ve had information overload? Need a hand getting to grips with SEO in more detail? Want someone else to optimise your website and finetune your copy? Drop me a line and I can help make sure your site is getting the traffic it deserves.