What Is SEO?
Have you ever wondered how websites get themselves to the first page of Google? Well, it takes a lot of effort, time and adaptation. Websites like Google have a very complex algorithm that ranks it’s web pages. This is essentially a list of boxes that your website should be ticking that change continuously.
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation. It’s the art behind getting your website moving up the rankings on search engines. And today we’re going to look at SEO in a bit more detail and what exactly it encompasses.
Firstly, let’s look at what exactly makes up SEO. With the first two being concerning traffic to your website. First, you’re going to want to look at the quality of visitors that are coming to your site. After all, you could have thousands coming through your website, but if they’re not your target audience, this is essentially made redundant. Next, you’re going to what to look at the number of people coming through your website. Ask yourself questions like:-
- Are there any specifics days that are busier than others?
- What time of the day is traffic busiest?
- What pages are these visitors going to?
- Where are they coming from? Google? Facebook?
The last part of SEO is organic traffic. In terms of traffic, it comes down to two main types. The first is paid traffic, this is when you’ve paid for adverts on search engines such as Google that will put you at the top of the page and charge you for every click. Organic traffic is whereby you’re not paying a penny, but rather, the customers are finding you themselves through the search results on Google.
Gaining a substantial amount of organic traffic is almost impossible without focusing your efforts into SEO. Think about it, when you’re searching for something in particular through a search engine such as Google, you’ll almost always find what you want on the first page. You’ll rarely sift through the 3rd, 4th and 5th pages to find what you want. And now think about your website, if you’re on one of those pages lower down, you’re not going to attract much organic traffic.
There are a tonne of different factors that go into SEO and how the search engine ranks your site, and we won’t go into them in too much detail but they include:-
- Having your site mapped by the search engine so that it knows the structure.
- How many times your website has been shared on social media.
- Usage of industry-relevant keywords
- How your pages on your website link both to other pages on the website itself and authoritative resources
- Use of meta-descriptions and meta-titles for blog posts
- Ongoing content creation.
All-in-all, if you have a website and you’re wanting to gain more traffic without having to pay for it, start encompassing SEO.
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