It’s a big buzzword these days, and I get asked many questions like “How can I rank number one” or “How do I do an SEO audit?” Web designers will tell you that the sites they design are SEO friendly for Google, that can basically mean anything if I’m honest and is often a BS statement to dazzle you and seal the deal with you to build your website. If you are confused about what your web designer means when he says your new website will have SEO, then ask him straight out ” will this get me on page one of Google?” If the answer is eeeeh, aaaaaah or weeelllllll then it’s buzz talk.
To me SEO or search engine Optimisation in its long form is the ONGOING process undertaken to get search engines to notice your website. This article goes into further detail on what SEO is but I’ve tried to simplify it here in terms of the most important things to understand when you are exploring SEO and only want a simple understanding of what your SEO is doing.
First of all you have on page SEO and this to me comes in two parts:
1. Making your website crawl friendly so that googles spiders can easily crawl, understand and index the information on your website. This is done by creating HTML site maps, removing robot.txt? etc.
2. Creating great content for your keywords, if you were a baker in Cork who wants to sell more wedding cakes then a good keyword for you to target would be “wedding cakes cork”. You should create great content that uses this keyword in a normal way so don’t write “if you want wedding cakes Cork you’re in the right place” instead make say something like “when searching for wedding cakes cork has plenty of extremely talented bakers, we are one of them….”. Write a headline that incorporates your keywords. Create a URL for the page that incorporates your keyword like www.examplebaker.ie/wedding-cakes-cork. Use your title and meta data, this article gives you some great insight on this subject.
Secondly you have off page SEO and if I was to explain all of these factors you would be reading for days but the simplest way to think of this is links and social. Build links that are useful to your business for instance, write a blog post for a relevant website that links back to your website. Enter your website in the major directories like google my business and yahoo local. Social comes into the link building as well because it helps you share your content with more users who may in turn share it with their peers.
This may increase your traffic and get people “talking” about the relevant subject you’ve written about which can help increase your website traffic and thus increase your ranking. In basic terms the more people “talking” about your website and your relevant content, the more likely googles algorithm is to sit up and take notice of your website. Creating great content on a regular basis is more likely to get people talking about your site.
If you want to get more serious about SEO then get off my website and go to learn from the masters at Moz and Search engine land, their blogs and communities offer a whole wealth of knowledge that will help you gain a really great understanding of SEO and what to do to rank your site.
If you have any questions we’re always here to help, get in touch with our Search team.