What is SEO?
SEO is short for Search engine Optimisation, this is the guidelines for optimising your website in order for search engines like Google, Bing, and others to help your website rank in the organic results. If you are not sure what is meant by organic results there are the websites that appear under the Google map listings. These listings are free when they are clicked on unlike Google’s PPC however you need to invest quite a bit of time in working on this or getting an SEO specialist in to do this for you. The long term benefits are huge and can lead to a considerable amount of leads from new businesses.
Why is SEO important?
In today’s competitive market, SEO marketing is more important than ever. Visibility to your end-user is everything and if you are not seen and quickly your chase of being clicked on is lost. Most of search engine traffic goes to the top 5 results this is worth remembering as it can help you achieve higher rankings and get more traffic. As you can see from the chart below the higher you rank the greater the chance of your website being clicked on.
So what are the 3 main reason to have SEO on your website?
i. Search engine optimisation is not only about search engines but good working SEO practices improve the user experience and usability of a web site, which in turn will generate leads
ii. Users trust search engines and having a presence in the higher ranking positions for the keywords increases the web site’s trust.
iii. SEO can put you ahead of your local competition. REMEMBER If two web sites are selling or promoting the same thing, the search engine that is optimised correctly and ranks well is the website that is more likely to generate more leads, providing your website is correctly designed to convert. (This is where good website design is imperative)
Looking into SEO there are 3 main areas that you need to understand. These are:
Technical SEO
The first stage in the search engine optimisation process is called technical SEO. As the above implies, technical SEO has nothing to do with the content of a website. It is mainly to do with the configurations and settings which allows all search engines to crawl your website better. If this is not the case then your website will have difficulty in being crawled and this will have a negative impact on your rankings.
On the other hand, if you have problems with crawling and indexing, it can negatively impact your rankings.
On-site SEO
The second stage is on-page search engine optimisation. This is primarily to do with the content, images and other elements found on a page.
Unlike technical and off-page search engine optimisation, the main focus of this is to provide search engine crawlers with enough information so that they can understand the meaning of the content of your website.
It is worth remembering that search engines like Google and Bing don’t read a page like us so they are looking for signals to figure out what a page is all about.
It is at this stage that you will need to think about the following:
- Website Design & Structure
- SEO Keywords
- Title Tags
- Headings
- Image Tags and Optimisation
- Internal and External links
- SERPS
- Structured Data Markups
If followed correctly, on-page SEO will also improve the usability and credibility of your website.
Off-site SEO
The third and final stage is off-page SEO, this is where you improve your website’s rankings the off-site SEO techniques. When you think of off-site the first thing that comes to mind is link-building. Not only link building but also local citations through local directories are well worth a look too.
So why is off-page SEO important? Well if you type in a search term for a product or service the search engine algorithms look into their index and locate the best page or pages that they feel will benefit the end-user. As we have mentioned earlier the pages that are well optimised and are relevant to the search query have a better chance at ranking. Thinking about this one of the main factors is the number of links to your site. Search engines see this as how trustable is your website and, if you think of that age-old saying, ” in business it’s not what you know but who you know”, search engines look at it the same way. The more links that you have the more people you know and in turn your rankings will be positively affected.
Conclusion
We hope that this guide will help you, however, if you feel you could do with some local help on SEO services in Doncaster give us a call for a free consultation.