SEO Basics: What is SEO?

The art of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is all about increasing 'Organic Traffic', this essentially means traffic that has found a page on your site through a search engine. 

The user has typed in a search query, your site has appeared in the SERP (Search engine results page) and voilà, they've clicked the link and now the user is on your site. When it comes to the question, what is seo? In very simple terms, SEO is about optimising this process to appear higher in the rankings for your chosen keyword.

Keeping the user on the site and converting the user is one for another day, in this article we'll take a quick look at some of the key things to consider when it comes to getting your site to rank higher in the search engine results pages.

SEO can be broken down into 3 simple elements:

On-Page SEO

On-Page SEO is all about making sure that you have the correct content on your site, aligning with what your customers are looking for or may find useful. 

You may have heard the term 'Keyword Research'; well this is a great place to start. Essentially you need to undertsand which keywords your customers are using to search for your product/service and optimise your pages accordingly. There are various tools you can use to do this, for example SEMRush or Moz.

It is best pratice to optimise individual pages on your site for unique primary keywords, this avoids what we call keyword cannibalisation. You need to select one primary keyword for each page. 

If you already have a site that is up and running, a great way to understand which keywords are currently driving traffic to each particular page is to use Google Search Console or alternatively use the Position Tracking report in SEMRush.

See the SEO Basics: On-Page SEO article for more information.

Off-Page SEO

Off-page SEO is the process by which your site demonstrates to the search engines that your website commands an authoritative voice in the marketplace.

In the off-line world, 'word of mouth' is a very powerful marketing tool, if a trusted friend or family member recommends something to you, the chances of you buying that product or hiring that service are significantly higher.

In short, search engines recognise this too! If high authority websites in your industry are are linking to your website, this is a way of saying your pre-approved. The more credible links you can get from high authority websites, the more credible your website begins to appear. 

There are several ways to get links back to your website (Known as backlinks), all of which relate to adding value, solving problems and essentially helping people; afterall, this is a core objective of your business. 

Depending on your market, it may be more appropriate to address local, national or international SEO tactics.

Look out for further content on this soon.

Technical SEO

Technical SEO is the process of monitoring site health, crawlability, site speed, structure, mobile optimisation, ssl certification, sitemap, robots.txt files and page errors. 

Setting up Google Search Console is a great start, you then have visibility of crawlability, index performance, 404 errors and other useful features. In addition Google Search Console has the facility to upload/update your sitemap; so Google is aware of your website/updates to your website. 

The robots.txt file gives search engines instructions when they come to crawl the site, this could be sending the search engine to the sitemap.xml file so it can knows pages exist or alternatively you may not want the site to be indexed by a search engine, in which case a 'no-index' tag is applied.

Consider robots.txt an instruction manual for search engines. 

Why is this important?

Search engines are constantly searching the internet (crawling) to stay up to date with new information, which means they can provide the most up to date results to users, if you're pages aren't indexed, you won't appear!

Feeling informed?

Well, I hope this article has given you a brief introduction into the world of SEO. 

Understanding the basics is a good first step, look out for following articles where I will take a closer look at each element and explain how to use some really useful tools that you can use to assist you in your SEO journey. 

If you have any questions, please feel free to drop me a direct message. 

Thanks for reading!