SEO is a vital part of any business marketing, especially if you operate a website or have any sort of online presence. Here, we run through the basics of what SEO is, how it can help your business to increase sales, drive more traffic and get your website seen by the right people!
What is SEO?
SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimisation” and it is a method for getting a website to rank higher up on the search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo. Whilst it is referred to as a single thing, SEO is made up of several different techniques which can be used together to help improve a website to get it seen by more people. Any business or organisation which has a website should be making the most of the SEO tools available to get more of the right people to see their site!
SEO is separate to web design, though there are some techniques which go hand in hand with the design side of things. There are three main areas to SEO:
- On Site Optimization
This is the part of SEO which is focussed particularly on the actual webpage aspects of your website. This can be things like improving heading, title tags, meta description, content, blog posts and more. Anything which is physically on the site is factored into on site SEO.
- Off Site Optimization
The off-site SEO is anything which is performed “off” your own website, and elsewhere on the internet. These are generally techniques to increase the quality and quantity of backlinks pointing to your website. These links all over the web are vital for showing search engines a) that your site is a good authority on a topic and b) that it is a trustworthy site as lots of other people are linking towards your content. When building backlinks, it is important that you develop these naturally and in a search engine safe way. In years gone by, it was all to easy for a marketing agency to bulk-buy thousands of backlinks for a site, which would quickly rank much higher for their keywords. Search engines have now made it much harder to do this and will penalise sites which they believe are breaking the rules when it comes to link building! Overall, it is far better to have a smaller number of high-quality links compared to thousands of poor qualities, or irrelevant links.
- Technical SEO
Technical SEO is another important aspect of SEO, where the focus is on all areas which are technical about your site. These can be things such as indexing issues, broken links, XML site mapping and more. The technical SEO side can also make improvements to the load speed and mobile optimisation of your site, which are vital for search engines in the present day.
How can SEO help my business?
SEO is only a small part of a more generalised marketing strategy; however, it can have seriously impressive results when done correctly. SEO is the only way to generate tangible results when you have an online presence. It is possible to perform SEO yourself, however it has become far more complex these days than it used to be ten, or even twenty years ago. There are now so many different ranking factors to be aware of, as well as numerous algorithm updates virtually every day. If in doubt, it is always better to hire a professional who can work on your site on your behalf to ensure you make the right improvements with a far lower risk of being handed a penalty!