What is search engine optimisation (SEO)?

It’s certainly been a year that has seen more happen online than offline. I certainly wouldn’t be surprised if like many of my new clients, you’ve decided to quickly set up a website for your business or organization during the COVID-19 pandemic. Or, you’ve decided to jazz up your existing website. When looking for help you keep encountering the term search engine optimisation “SEO”. What does it stand for? Here, I’ll explain what it means and how to approach it best!

What is Search Engine Optimisation SEO?

SEO stands for search engine optimisation. In the most basic of terms, it’s a practice in which you’re optimizing your web pages to be of a higher quality so that they appear in Google’s or other search engines. The higher you rank on the search engines, the more traffic you’ll have come to the site, which is good for the business of course.

Google’s efforts are to help improve the rankings based on the organic search results. If you run a business or organization, then SEO should be something to incorporate into your marketing strategy.

How does Google’s Algorithm work?

With Google’s algorithm, like most, it’s always changing and the algorithm itself is a secret. However, over the years, experience in SEO has determined that there are likely two ranking factors that contribute to the algorithm and are worth knowing when you’re looking to optimize your website. These are on-page and off-page factors. On-page SEO is are things that will be influential within the website itself. So these might be the technical elements like your coding, site speed, and quality of content.

For off-page SEO, it may be links from other websites, any social media attention that mentions your site, marketing activities, etc. Anything, where your website is being advertised outside of your own site, is going to contribute to this off-page factor of the algorithm.

So the more you can check off in terms of these factors, the higher your webpages will rank and help your website overall.

How Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) benefits your website

As a business or organization, you’ve got the competition that wasn’t there some decade or so ago on the internet. Things have advanced so much that you’re just a small drop in a very big ocean when it comes to your website. With that being said, things like SEO are part of the contribution your website provides through its webpages. The better those webpages can look and appear to Google and other search engines, the higher it goes. You want to end up on that first few pages of the results, otherwise, you’re unlikely to be seen. 

As a business or organization, you may be new to the industry and so it’s good to do what your competition is doing. This can be a great way of understanding what is working for them and how you could take some creative liberties to do something similar. However, regardless of what you do, search engine optimisation is one of the most important parts of building up your website’s reputation and popularity. So with that, there are lots of things you can be doing to make sure your SEO is being done properly.

Practice ‘Holistic SEO’

SEO isn’t something that you can do once or twice and then be done with it. It’s something that will need to be monitored and constantly improved where possible. As the algorithms can change and SEO changes, it’s good to stay on top of practicing holistic SEO. This is where your primary goal is to have a website that is well maintained and run in the best way possible to help your business or organization succeed.

A sustainable long-term strategy is needed because there have been many sites caught out by Google for trying to cut corners in order to get there quicker. If your website is high-quality all of the time, then you’ll have no problems ranking higher in Google’s search engine and on others that are reputable. It’s the aim of these search engines to get their users to the right information so that the internet becomes a universally accessible and functional place.

There are plenty of things that you can do yourself when it comes to basic SEO and that you don’t need a huge amount of experience with. For starters, quality of content is always important and it’s something that you should practice with everything on your site, from blog content to your ‘About Us’ page. Compressing images can also help improve page loading speeds and you may find that giving the images the same keywords for the page itself can also help with ranking the page higher up.

Consider A Website Audit

With many businesses and organizations, knowledge of SEO may be limited and in most cases, outsourcing this assistance might be useful. A website audit is just one way that can be helpful to get a full and in-depth analysis of how your website is performing in relation to the search engines. 

WordPress website audits are definitely helpful in being able to find the problem areas of your website that you might not be aware of or don’t have the available knowledge in-house to fix it. If you’re after some quick fixes, then it’s worth looking into outsourcing and also using the tips above to help develop your website through SEO.

SEO can be good for your website

There are many benefits of using search engine optimisation for your business and now that you’re clued up on the basics and benefits of it for your website, it’s worth implementing it into whatever marketing strategy you currently have. The online world is forever changing, so this is a role that certainly needs fulfilling on a regular basis. 

The more you can do to improve your search engine optimisation, the better it’s going to rank your website on the result pages. Use this as an opportunity to develop and grow your business in a modern-day world with the benefits of search engine optimisation. Hopefully, with SEO, you’ll see a great improvement to your business and its development.

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