A Beginners Guide to SEO Image

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a method of increasing the quantity and the quality of traffic to your website through organic search results.

Before we try to explain how to practice SEO, it’s best we explain the different parts of SEO.

Qualitative traffic probably the most important part. You can invite anyone and everyone to visit your site, but if they’re not there for your products or services, then they are not quality traffic. It is important to spend your time attracting visitors that are actually interested in your business and the products/services your offer.

Once you get the qualitative traffic that you want, it’s about increasing the quantity of traffic. Obviously, the more qualitative traffic to your site, the increased likelihood of business transactions.

Organic search results are results that have not been paid for. The majority of the time, the first few results are paid ads, organic search results will be the links below that have been ranked by the highest relevancy t0 the user’s search query. This is what SEO is all about.

So, how does SEO work?

Search engines have crawlers that analyse content and information from the internet. This information is then built into an index and fed through an algorithm to create your search result.

There are a lot of different factors that optimize a  search engine’s algorithm, the most influential information comes from links, content and title tags.

 

How do I practice SEO?

There are multiple different factors of SEO, therefore, we have created a general overview of how to best practice it:

Produce Quality Content

It’s important to produce high-quality, unique content to help improve your SEO ranking. The more high-quality content you produce, the more the search engines have to read and analyse your site. The more information that crawlers analyse, the more they understand the service of your site.

Link Related Content 

Building links between external sites and your own can increase the number of high-quality links to a website. This can, in turn, increase the likelihood of your website ranking high in search engine results.

Research Keywords

Using tools such as SEMrush or MOZ, you can research the important keywords related to your business. You want to find keywords that your customers and leads are using to find your competitors and similar brands. Content can then be built around these keywords and phrases to improve your chances of being found on search engine result pages (SERP).

Have a Mobile-Friendly Site

In this day and age, it is essential to have a mobile-friendly website. Nearly 50% of all web traffic is from mobile devices. Without a mobile-friendly site, you are eliminating half of your potential audience. Not only does a mobile-friendly site increase user experience, but it also contributes to your SEO ranking.

What should I not do?

Whilst there are numerous ways to improve SEO, there are also several factors that can hinder your SEO performance.

Low-Quality Content

It may seem like the more content you have on your site, the better. However, in this case, it is quality over quantity. Having content on your site that isn’t relevant or doesn’t answer the person’s question, can negatively impact your SEO. This type of content isn’t helpful for your site visitors, search engines will know this and penalise your site for this.

Having an Overwhelming amount of Keywords

Having relevant keywords within your content is beneficial, however, stuffing your content with keywords in every sentence without reason can be more detrimental than you think. If it isn’t going to benefit the site visitor or provide any sort of value to your content, then similarly to low-quality content, search engines will penalise this and lower your search engine ranking.

Creating Spam Via Links

Yes, links to reputable sites and quality sources can help improve your search engine ranking. However, spamming various websites with links to your content can do more harm than good. Once again, search engines will notice this type of behaviour and lower your search engine ranking as a result.

Why is SEO important?

So, you know the best practices for SEO, but it seems like a lot of work, so why should you bother?

When you’re looking for a product or service, you no longer refer to the Yellow Pages. No matter the industry or size of your business, having an online presence is vital for your business to reach as many potential customers as possible.

Obviously, there are many different types of digital marketing to reach these customers, but one of the best ways is through organic search engine results.

Improving your SEO will increase your ranking on search engine results pages. This improves your online visibility and increasing your chances of being found by potential customers online.

 

Before you dive into the deep end, start off small and work on the content your providing to your visitors. Once this is done, you can then focus on improving your businesses SEO and develop a sure-fire plan to improve your search engine ranking.

It’s no secret that SEO can be complex and it cand be difficult to get the time. If you would like improving your businesses SEO, Contact Us to discuss how we can help you, on Dungannon 028 3754 9025 or Belfast 028 9002 5050.