What is SEO?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation.

A mandatory marketing tactic if you want your website to be found through search engines like Google.

You’ve likely heard of SEO, and if you haven’t already, you could obtain a quick Wikipedia definition of the term, but basically SEO is “the process of affecting the visibility of a website or a web page in a search engine’s unpaid list of results”.

Lots and lots of people search for things. That traffic can be extremely powerful for a business, not only because there is a lot of traffic, but because there is a lot of very specific, high-intent traffic.

If you sell Yo-Yos… would you rather pay to advertise on a billboard where anyone with a car in your local area sees your ad (whether they will ever have any interest in Yo-Yos or not)?

Or… would you rather pop up every time anyone in the world types “buy Yo-Yos” into a search engine? They intend to buy something you offer.

Increasingly, additional elements are being weighed by Google’s algorithm to determine where your site will rank, things such as:

Loading Speed

Mobile Friendliness

Key Words

Title Tags

Meta Descriptions

Headline/Subtitle Ordering

Alt Attributes

URL Structures

.XML Sitemap

To name the most common things to look at. Google also looks at how people engage with your site (Do they find the information they need and stay on your site, or bounce back to the search page and click on another link?) Do you have unique page content, or are you doubling up on the same information throughout all of your pages?

All of these things simultaneously change the way Google ranks a page and how you can stand out from your competitors.

I use the best practices for your page structures to give you the best chances of indexing highly in Google and “encourage the traffic to come to you”

(For those interested in going into serious detail and SEO understanding Yoast have an amazingly detailed website with more information than you could possibly wish for!)