SEO is so important in today’s digital marketing. It’s one of my most effective strategies in gaining website traffic and I have seen many clients see success through employing even just the SEO basics.
57 per cent of business to business marketers say that SEO generates more leads than any of their other marketing initiatives.
SEO is the practice of tweaking your website to get organic traffic through search engines. Mainly, the biggest search engine of them all: Google. The tweaking (also known as optimisation) are the changes that you make on the page with content and in the backend of your website platform. SEO also involves the process of driving traffic to your website (through social media and paid ads etc). SEO involves both onsite optimisation and offsite optimisation.
The entire aim of SEO is to rank in the first couple of results (ideally somewhere on the first page) whenever someone Googles something that is relevant to your website. Or, specifically, one of your SEO keywords.
Crawling and indexing
Search engines are known to have two significant functions. Those being crawling and indexing websites and providing searchers with a ranked list of web pages they’ve determined to have the most helpful and relevant content they are searching for.
To better understand this, picture the internet as a network of stops in a metropolis subway system. If every stop is a unique web page, we will have over a billion stops as the internet is a massive city. Since it is imperative for search engines to crawl through the entire city and discover all stops along the way, the quickest paths through the city are found using links.
Links make it possible for search engines’ automated robots, also known as crawlers, to quickly search and catalogue a largenumber of interconnected documents on the internet. Once it locates these pages, the search engine creates a unique code for them and saves this information in large specialised databases, to be recalled and put to use only when needed in a search query.
Providing answers
Search engines are more like answer machines providing users with information relating to questions asked. When an individual performs a search online, the search engine immediately scours its gigantic database to pull up information relevant to the search query.
This brings us to a fundamental question:
How do search engines like google determine the relevance and popularity of a web page?
This explanation by SEO giant Red Evolution sums it up pretty well:
‘Google promotes authority pages to the top of its rankings, so it’s your job to create pages that become authority pages. This involves writing content people find useful because usefulcontent is shared in blogs, twitter feeds etc., and over time Google picks up on these authority signals. This virtuous circle creates strongand sustainable Google rankings.’
The above tells us that Google determines a website’s relevance by analysing its content, considering where certain words (known as keywords) are and how often they occur in that material. It also measures a website’s authority by the number of links pointing to it and how trustworthy those links are.
It is the job of great SEO copywriting to build up your website’s relevance organically. In the past, this meant making sure your webpage had all the right keywords but these days this is a bit more difficult than it sounds. And it’s not enough to just have the right keywords. Google continuously updates their search algorithm to look for high qualitycontent that will be useful and not just one targeted to beat their system.
SEO can be a complex and detailed process. But you have to start somewhere. Browse through these informative SEO writing posts to learn the basics that anyone can put into place.
