Understanding your data and how it helps you
What is SEO?
To get a visual idea of what Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is, just imagine trying to find a needle in a haystack. It would take days.Now think of the internet as a haystack with about two billion websites. Your website is the needle. But the haystack keeps growing, with an estimated 250,000 new websites created each day. Good luck trying to find that needle/website!
The solution for this massive task is handled by search engines that index (catalogue) web pages. They have a formula for deciding what each page is about and ranking the quality of the information.When someone searches for something, Google sifts through its billions of indexed pages and decides on the pages that best match the search question. It then presents them in the order it believes will best suit the user.
SEO is all about being chosen. (We can help with that – Make Contact.)It is the process of improving the visibility of a website on search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and others. The goal is to make sure that potential customers can find your website when they search for specific keywords relevant to your business.
Note the use of the word “process”. You can optimise your website and then take a set-and-forget approach but unless you receive a huge volume of traffic, that’s unlikely to get you to the top of page one. Similarly, if SEO is all about influencing the visibility of a website in search engine results, you need to understand that those results change all the time. To stay at the top takes work – and that work is a “process”.As you steadily improve the visibility of your website, it increases the probability that users can find your website when they search for relevant keywords.
The search engines also need to find your website – and all of its pages. So your SEO task list should include making sure your site is as easy for search engines to crawl and understand, so that it returns high-quality results in their indexes.
You should also ensure your content is as useful as possible. The more useful it is, the longer people stay on your site, the more pages they view and the higher you will rank. The skill in writing great content is to be both useful and also include keywords.Experts don’t agree on the number of types of SEO but there’s general agreement that you need to be covering off the basics for:
Keep in mind that you apply every recommendation that you read about. It would be a never-ending, full time job. Instead, it’s important to focus on the critical success factors. Employ the Parento Principle and focus on those activities that will give you the biggest ‘bang for buck’.
Do NOT be tricked into thinking you can achieve a sneaky advantage with what is called Black Hat SEO. This employs practices that the search engines frown upon. When you get caught, your site is penalised and you drop down the rankings, meaning that all of your excellent White Hat SEO gains were a waste of time.
Finally, SEO is about ranking organically. You’ll hear that term a lot and not just at Boylen. It basically means you don’t pay the search engine (unlike advertising). Your website pages are listed, sifted, sorted and presented to users for free.
But don’t be fooled, there is a cost to SEO. It’s your time. Or you may pay experts to handle it for you.
More SEO Knowledge To Boost Your Performance:
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