Search Engine Optimisation otherwise known in the industry as SEO, is the art of ranking high organically (free listings) within a search engine such as Google.
SEO is the process of optimising your online content so that it easier for a search engine to find and rank so that in return you then appear higher than your competitors on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP).
Despite the acronym, SEO is as much about the user as it is about the search engines.
It’s about understanding user intent and what your target audience is searching for online, such as the answers they need, the words they use and the type of content they wish to obtain.
To become a true SEO master, you need to not only understand your audience intent and create content around that but also deliver the content in a way that search engine crawlers or otherwise known as spiders can find and understand the content in order for it to rank.
Now we understand the basics, let’s go a little deeper...
The Three Pillars of SEO
Search engine optimisation is split into many categories, but they all come under these three main pillars as we like to call them: Technical, On-Page and Off-Page.
Technical SEO
Technical SEO is a very important step. If there are errors found within your technical SEO, there is a good chance you will not generate the expected results.
Technical SEO helps search engines access, crawl, interpret and index your website. It’s called “technical” because it actually has nothing to do with the content on the site and often happens behind the scenes.
Meta Title Tags (Page Titles) and Meta Descriptions (Page Descriptions) play a huge part in technical SEO.
On-Page SEO
On-Page SEO is the process of ensuring the content within your site is relevant, provides a great user experience and includes the right keywords.
This includes the copy (writing) of each page, image alt-text (image descriptions) which are found in a websites HTML and H1 and H2 tags, often set as page titles and sub-titles to help search engines rank the writing on your page in terms of importance to the user.
Off-Page SEO
Off-Page SEO is the process of enhancing your site’s search engine ranking through activities outside of the site. This is largely driven by backlinks that determine the overall rank of your website. A backlink is created when your website receives an inbound link from a completely separate website.
All of your site’s backlinks form two groups, “follow” and “no-follow”. While only “follow” links influence your actual site and domain ranking, both are important to have when building your backlink profile.
So let’s look at an example for both “follow” and “no-follow”…
Your business listing in a local newspaper index would have a high chance of being a “no-follow” link, whereas a news article with your website url placed into the copy would have a high chance of being a “follow” link.
Building a strong backlink profile for your website allows you to compete for those higher-ranking keywords and phrases that will pull in lots of site visitors.
Want to find out your website domain ranking?
There are some great premium services out there to help you with your SEO, but if you’re just looking for a quick free way to see your ranking, don’t worry we’ve got you…
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