SEO Simplified

A search engine’s job is to present the most helpful list of sites to users, according to what is being searched for. How does a search engine like Google know what websites are the most helpful and relevant sites for any search?

SEO is anything you do to make your website noticed by a search engine (depending on the search query).

Onsite SEO includes linking, coding, content, keywords, plus anything on your site that informs and engage your audience.

Offsite SEO includes integrating your social media accounts to your site. Google and Bing notice social interaction as audience engagement. Your social channels should drive your audience to your website and this is good SEO.

Google’s job is to present the most helpful and relevant sites to audiences. They want to make sure that the results they serve up are the best results, and if they see an audience interacting with content — any kind of content — that leads back to your website, that’s a signal that they should pay attention to your brand.

Is SEO important for every website?

If you have a niche business purpose, without competitors, you may not need to put the full SEO process in place to get traffic to your website.

But it’s always important to have optimised content that informs and engages your audience.

Indexing websites with Google and Bing is vital if you want to get listed in a search.

Organic SEO

Traffic that gets to your website from a search engine results page, without the user clicking on a paid advertisement to get there, is organic SEO. Organic SEO refers to the processes of increasing the quality and quantity of traffic to your site without paying for advertising to get users to click through to your website.

Methods used to improve a website’s organic SEO rankings include:

• website content — use of relevant and meaningful keywords, especially in headings

• user experience — search engines measure your site’s activity; a good website structure with helpful, logical, meaningful content contributes to SEO

• backlinks — i.e. external, reputable websites that include a link to your website.

Working on a website’s content and technical SEO contributes to a website’s organic SEO.

Content SEO

Optimising web content contributes to search engine optimization. Content SEO includes:

• using headings to clearly label your content — use of relevant and meaningful keywords

• making sure your content offers a good user experience. Search engines measure your site’s activity; a good website structure with helpful, logical, meaningful content contributes to SEO because a user of your website will unlikely engage with your content.

Technical SEO

There are numerous factors that make up technical SEO.

Improving a website’s load speed is part of technical SEO.

Having a good website structure to help search engines understand your content, and what content will provide users what are looking for in a search query.

Adding schema markup to your pages also assists search engines with understanding your content on specific page to return more informative results for users.