What is SEO?
So now you will be wondering “what is this SEO service I keep getting emailed about guaranteeing me rank #1 on Google for 5 dollars a month?” Well for a starter that is not true, no one can guarantee they will get you rank #1 on Google and if they do, that should be a red flag to walk away. Don’t believe us? Google state “No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google” on their blog here.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the process of affecting the visibility of a website or a web page in a search engine's "natural" or un-paid ("organic") search results. This primarily consists of two areas, the first being what most people assume SEO to be and that is getting your current position higher in Google the idea being that the higher in Google, Yahoo, Bing and the other search engines your site appears, the more users will find it and thus traffic/revenue will increase.
The other side of the equation is getting more positional listings for your website, by getting the site ranked for keywords it didn’t previously rank for, imagine you were low on Google and with SEO you got to page 1 that is great progress and that is what the first part of SEO consists of. The second part consists of generating new keywords, new key phrases and getting them ranked so you end up with 10 keywords or keyphrases all ranking highly, bringing in potentially 10x as much traffic as just the one keyword (assuming of course the search volume is similar on each).
In order to do this we use two methods of SEO, On-Site SEO and Off-Site SEO.
On-Site SEO
On-Site optimisation is also called On-Page optimisation, this is the process of optimising the website for search engines but more importantly optimising it for your users. This involves doing things such as adjusting the meta data, heading structure, heading tags, alt text, content, URL structure, sitemaps, redirects, microdata and so much more that it is almost impossible to list them all on here.
Using On-Site optimisation you are making it clear to Google, Yahoo, Bing and the other search engines what your website is about, but not only that, by performing technical On-Site optimisation you are ensuing that the website is as open as possible to the search engines and providing the best possible ranking potential.
Off-Site SEO
Off-site SEO is the trickier of the two, this involves gaining backlinks from other websites which in turn will tell Google your site is popular and Google will increase the sites authority and rankings as a result. For instance lets say you sell pancakes and you put your recipe online, if you have 100 links pointing to your site as opposed to 2 or 3 you would assume the 100 links website is the most popular version and thus it would be ranked higher.
In order to gain backlinks you have to create high quality content aimed at your customers, not Google, this in turn will attract people to your site and they will start to link back to your web pages on social media, blogs maybe even their own site. As well as this we also have to “seed” the website out to the authority websites for your sector in order to hopefully get high authority backlinks which carry a lot of weight in the rankings.
However, you have to be careful with backlinks in that they are gained naturally not paid for, for instance there’s services out there that you can buy hundreds of back links for as little as £5, this is known as “black hat” SEO and is a bad practise that can result in a Google penalty, which can ultimately see your site disappear from the Search Engine results, more on this in our next blog post where we dive into White and Black Hat SEO and what it all means!
We can help you market your website by putting together a bespoke SEO plan that encompasses On-Site and Off-Site White Hat SEO, get in touch with us today to go over your SEO requirements and find out the positive impact this can have on your business.
Missed Part 1 of our Introduction to SEO? Make sure to have a read!