Search Engine Optimisation, SEO, is a technique that helps to increase the traffic to your website by increasing the ranking in Search Engines such as Google and Yahoo. The more SEO you use, the higher your website will rank, meaning that when a potential client types in the search words for your business, your website will appear high up in the results.
There are two different types of SEO, On Page SEO and Off Page SEO. Both will help to drive traffic to your website and improve your position in the SERP, (search engine results page). Both On and Off Page SEO are designed to make your website popular on the internet.
On Page SEO
On-page, SEO is the technique whereby you optimise individual web pages to rank higher in search engines and gain more relevant traffic to your website. The on page aspect refers to both the content on the page and the HTML source code. The biggest problem with on-page SEO is that the practices do change, so you will need to be prepared to update your keyword targeting regularly.
So here’s a bit of science behind the on-page SEO.
Google and other search engines use crawler-bots to search through your website and search for the keywords. Your meta robots tag is essential for allowing the crawling, if the Googlebot cannot crawl through your site, you won’t appear in the search engine. So your URL needs to be allowed by your robots.txt, and your URL needs to be in your site map.
Next, you will need to ensure that each individual page on your website actually contains those essential keywords. A good trick here is to google your essential keywords and see what the top three ranking URLs are. Then look to see where they overlap, those areas will contain the keywords that you can use to ensure maximum optimisation on your own pages.
Make sure you have good title tags and meta descriptions. These are the first impressions that a potential customer will get of your site, so you want them to be enticing and encourage the all-important call to action.
You need to have good headings, images, videos, blogs and even commonly asked questions and answers. All the elements that will create a user-friendly site. Look at the SERP, if there is something that is commonly appearing, include it on your site.
One of the most important things not to overlook is to keep your page fresh. A website needs to be regularly reviewed and updated. Keep adding to it to keep it relevant.
Off-Page SEO
Off-page SEO techniques help to make your website more popular on the internet by increasing its visibility. As discussed above, the on-page techniques increase your visibility in search engines, but the off-page SEO helps to improve your website’s position in the SERP.
So how do we do this?
Firstly you will need to create shareable content. We know that content is the key to optimising your website, and creating content that is shareable will increase the number of backlinks to your website. Keep the content up to date and link blogs etc to your other social media accounts.
This brings us neatly to another way to improve your off-page SEO, social media. It is important to keep up to date with your social media accounts. That involves posting regularly but also engaging with your followers. Regular updates on what you are doing are essential to create that online presence and build trust and links with your followers. However, you need to also like and comment on your follower’s posts as well to create two-way engagement which in turn will help you to create more backlinks to your website. Sites such as Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and Linkedin are good places to start.
You can also try to share content with influencers in your industry and ask them to check out your blogs. Ask the relevant influencers for link backs to their blog. You may also be able to contribute as a guest author a few of the influencers’ blogs. Research thoroughly and offer something unique to be in with a chance of creating that guest spot.
Participate in Q&A sessions with followers and on forums such as www.answers.yahoo.com. Use any and every opportunity to share your website in answer to a problem/question.
Another immediate and highly interactive media to use is video. Whether you are creating vlogs for your website, doing lives or have a YouTube channel, people are more likely to engage with you if you have a visual presence. The more they engage, the more you can create those backlinks. Live content is a fabulous way to engage in Q&A sessions with your customers and it allows them to see you as a person, not just a brand. People buy from people.
Social bookmarking sites are also a great platform to promote and gain high traffic for your website or blog. Sites such as delicious.com and stumbleupon.com are popular bookmarking websites that are worth looking into.
There are all kinds of sharing sites that you can share your blogs, pictures, videos and articles. The more links you create the more traffic will be driven to your website and the higher you will rank in the SERP.
In Conclusion
Essentially, the more present you are in other social media areas, the more you will be seen. The more you are seen, the more interaction and links you will create which will lead back to your website making you a high-ranking website in most search engines.
Likewise, the more current and relevant your website is, the more you keep a check on those all-important keywords and elements, the higher you will rank. A website is something that needs attention, you cannot just set it up and leave it, you must keep updating and renewing your content.
