So, you’ve heard of SEO (search engine optimisation), you like what you’ve heard, and now you want to figure out how it works. Well, you’ve come to the right place. Search engine optimization is an excellent technique for helping people find your business website through search engines, without paying for advertising. Say for example you’ve just made some bitcoin profit and you were searching online for a business to help you exchange it to a different currency. The businesses you would see on the first page of the search engine results will either be there because they’ve spent a lot of money on ads or because their SEO has got them there.
Companies that understand how it works will appear at high on the search engine results page, maximising the chances of people seeing them, clicking through to them, and engaging with them. So, without any further ado, let’s look at the basics of SEO:
The 3 Main Features That Influence SEO Ranking
Technical SEO – the structure that allows search engines to crawl, index and rank your site. To the uninitiated, search engines like Google use bots to crawl pages to see if they’re suitable for indexing. When crawling the website, it will look at the page speed, site structure, responsiveness, security and other factors.
Off-page SEO – This relates to any efforts you make that aren’t actually on the website. They consist of various items that help determine and improve the authority of the site. Good examples of these would be link building, reviews, guest blogging, social media marketing and more.
On-page SEO – This refers to the content on your website, things you can directly control. Quality content is a must, plus the elimination of any technical issues. Whether it’s text, audio, or video, they all play a part in the SEO process. Furthermore, other on-page elements are only seen by search engines, such as structured data and HTML tags.
SEO Keywords
Keywords are certain words that are identified by Google and other search engines to bring up the results the user is looking for. This could be a simple term or could be a string of words (these are called long-tail keywords).
Websites looking to rank for certain words relating to their business will create content that includes these keywords. By doing so, search engines will then display the pages in their search results when a user searches a relevant term. However, other influences can determine if the website page shows up or not, even if the keyword is added. SEO is a powerful tool, but it is not an exact science!
The Importance of Good Content
The quality of the content cannot be overlooked when trying to get to grips with SEO. The better it is, the greater the chance that readers stay on the site for longer. This indicates to search engines that those that use your site for information are gaining value from it. Therefore, it can increase the chance of the website page outranking competitors that are targeting the same keywords. Nobody knows exactly how the search engine algorithms work; best policy is to treat them as you would a human being reading your content. If they find your content useful and informative, chances are the search engine will.
Understanding It Takes Time
Those who follow all the SEO best practices won’t expect to see results overnight. This is especially true for new websites. It can take time for search engines to trust the website. It’s commonly agreed between amongst engine optimisation experts that it can take up to 6-months before seeing any concrete results. Therefore, patience is very much needed when you are making your website more SEO friendly.