SEO can be a key factor in making your businesses digital presence successful. Without it, your reach is massively limited. But fear not! For I have devised a short guide! (Stay tuned for a tasty part two!)
Let us get on with it.
WHAT IS SEO?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation – It is a handy little thing that makes your websites get served up more by search engines. Search engines crawl the web, finding every website, and making an index for it. Then, it will only serve your website to those people who it thinks want to see them. But how could it know? Well, using the meta information you put onto your website, it uses keywords to decide. Let us say someone uses Google to search for “cats playing in a box.” Google would serve the websites with the word’s cats, playing, and box in their meta information, which they have indexed.
WHY DO YOU NEED GOOD SEO?
Good SEO allows you to reach as many potential customers as possible. It ensures that you have the maximum reach possible for your business, allowing it to maximise its potential. On top of that, it gives you an edge over your competition, and research into SEO gives you a strong indicator of market shifts and changes in trends relating to your area. SEO is essential for all businesses who are in the messy sea called the internet. It simply allows you to be found so much easier.
WHAT MAKES GOOD SEO?
Unfortunately, it is not as simple as putting in a few random words in your meta tags. One of the first things I would recommend doing is keyword analysis/research. You can pay companies to do this for you. What this is, is extensive research into what keywords in your topic area generate the most possible traffic (searched/viewed the most) so you know which words work best. You can always hire an SEO specialist to do all this for you – I would recommend you do this as part of a rebrand/website rebuild, so your business can be as search-friendly as possible right from the get-go.
It may seem obvious, but you also need good content! Good, well-structured content is great for SEO – it helps Search Engine “Crawlers” view your content and what it’s about faster and easier. Another great thing to have as part of your content is links to other pages. These could be on your website or elsewhere. “Crawlers” work by following every link on a page and indexing what they find; so, if you have lots of links to your own page within your own website, it helps crawlers find you more easily and brings more attention to your website.
SEO FACTS
- 64% of all web traffic comes from organic searches – so making sure your website is optimised for it is vital!
- 70% of marketers see SEO as more effective than PPC advertising! (see here)
- Google alone has received over 360 billion queries! That`s around 48 searches per person on the planet!
- 55% of websites don’t have a single backlink! (Don’t be that guy!)
- Top results on the first page of a Google query have on average 3.8 times the average number of backlinks!
