Having a beautiful website that functions perfectly is all well and good… but if people don’t find your website when they are looking for your product or service, then they will never know that they are missing out!
It has been said that the best place to hide a dead body is on page 2 of a google search. No one ever looks there! WIth that in mind, it is imperative to try to rank on page 1 – and optimising your SEO will help to get you there!
Search Engine Optimisation is a complex beast and there are many factors that come into play when optimising your website – but in this article I am going to outline the absolute basics.
On Page SEO
On page SEO refers to the optimisation of your own website for search engines. All search engines have what are known as ‘bots’ that ‘crawl’ your website to find out what content you have and add your site to their catalogue.
What the bot finds when navigating through your website will decide what searches they feel your website would be relevant to and how high up the rankings your website should sit.
Most people think of SEO and automatically think of keywords. Although keywords are a huge factor, they are not the only element that search engines look for. Google’s algorithm changes regularly, but the key factor for on-page optimisation is user experience. This means the relevance of your content to your audience, mobile optimisation and page speed.
A lot of this will be down to the design of the website, but a huge part of SEO is helping the search engine’s bots to understand the website in the way a human would when they arrive on your page.
SEO specialists are able to go through the back end of your website and optimise every element of this, adding tags and meta data to your site content to spell out to the bots what your website is all about and optimising content and the technical elements of your website to increase page loading speeds and improve rankings.
off site SEO
Off site Search Engine Optimisation is all about getting your content out there outside of your website.
You will hear a lot of SEO specialists talk about backlinks. These are links back to your own website from another source. These can be from mentions in an article, from a guest post that you have written, or a variety of different sources.
Something that Google ranks your website on is page authority (basically quality and relevance to your audience) and if a website with a high authority sends a link back to your own website, it shows Google that the site trusts you and it will transfer some of that authority juice back with the link, boosting your site authority at the same time!
Building up backlinks and sources for your content can be a very time consuming task, but SEO specialists are on hand to take this element off your plate and find these relevant sources for you!
Be aware, sharing the same article word for word to multiple sources on the internet can actually have a negative effect on SEO (Google doesn’t like duplication!), so if you do go down the off site SEO route, make sure to keep your content fresh!
Need some help with your SEO?
Our SEO specialists would be delighted to help you!
With fixed monthly price packages available, why not take a look and see how we can help to increase your rankings and get your website found on Google?
