If you don’t already know, SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation and it’s become such a normal thing nowadays that the term is in the Cambridge dictionary.
So, what is SEO?
SEO is the method used to place your website or content at a higher ranking on Google and increase your web traffic with visitors who are genuinely interested in your content/ website.
There are several different elements involved in the process of SEO.
- Keyword research
- Content writing
- Meta content
- Link building
- Internal structure
Why is SEO important?
SEO helps increase your web traffic but not with any old visitor. With the right people. The people that want to see what you have to offer, whether that’s information or products and services.
The better your SEO, the higher you will rank on Google. You probably know yourself that if you Google something, you’re probably only going to choose a link on the first page of results. And it’s SEO that will help get you to that first page of results.
The more traffic you get, from the right people, the more likely you are to have them buy your products or services or share your content to reach more people.
What’s involved in the SEO process?
Keyword research
Keywords and phrases are what Google uses to work out what your content is about. It then uses these keywords to show your content for the relevant search terms.
For example, if your website or content is all about roof top tents and those words are organically throughout your text, when someone searches for roof top tent, Google can share your website to those people.
Keyword research involves working out which keywords and phrases you want to rank for, what your competitors are ranking for and what people are actually searching for. (If you rank first for hand embroidered lampshades, but no one is searching for that, it’s not going to help increase your web traffic as much as something less specific that people are actually searching for.) It’s about finding the balance.
Content writing
Once you’ve done your keyword research, you need to tailor your content to include those keywords you want to rank for. But it has to be organic. You can’t put your decided keywords in white text at the bottom of the page. Google knows that’s what you’re doing, and you won’t rank that way.
Meta content
A meta tag is a short description of what your page is about. They’re not on the actual page, they’re written in the source code of a page, but they are vital to SEO because it’s how Google determines what your content is about.
Link building
Not all links are for SEO purposes. When you’re quoting a source, linking a product or page that you thought was good or just wanted to share, these aren’t put in for your SEO purposes. But they will help the website that you have linked. It means you’re potentially helping them get traffic they didn’t do anything to get.
So, it’s always the aim to have websites link through to yours to help rank you higher and gain more web traffic.
Link building is exactly that, creating a strategy to help you get backlinks to your website.
Internal structure
The structure of your site is another element of SEO. It is the way you browse from one page to another. Google uses your site structure to work out which of your pages are most important.
Can I go from here to an SEO training page? Great. Now can I get back to the homepage? No. The likelihood is if it’s hard to find your way around a website or you can’t go back to the last page and have to start again, you’ll leave that website and find another.
It can also help create site links when showing your website in search results. This means Google will show the main page and some of your more popular pages like it does here with LinkedIn.
There are lots of different elements to SEO and each one is just as important as the last. SEO is an evolving process given Google keeps updating its algorithms.
There are so many SEO courses out there it can be hard to choose one. Marcadet offers tailored SEO courses, so if you’re new to SEO and need to learn the basics, need to fill a gap about a particular element or want to learn a little bit more about all of them, we’ve got an SEO training course just for you.
