What is SEO?
SEO stands for Search Engine optimisation, which is how well google, Bing, Duck Duck go and others rate your website based on a number of factors in order to rank it higher. In most instances though, SEO relates to methods of improving your ranking capabilities and ultimately getting the top spot on the Search Engine Your aiming towards (Usually improving your Google Rank). SEO is essentially based on a score system (More on this later), and certain things are easily fixed and will immediately improve your score, like your page loading speed. While others could take up to 6 months to improve your overall SEO such as your keyword density, your specific focus keywords (if you change them) or even backlinks.
How does SEO Work?
There are 3 main factors to SEO: (E.A.T)
The first main factor is Expertise,
although the least concerning in the long term, as this merely relates to whether or not are you putting out quality information based on facts with your own or collective knowledge of your business. Why do we say this is the least concerning, is that most companies will focus their efforts on what they are good at. If your business is a hotel your website will automatically be geared towards your industry and most of your content would either be focused on your business, your surroundings, or your services. No one will be looking for a mechanic on a hotel website, and no search engine would either.
The second main Factor is Authority,
Authority is built up over time, things that effect your authority ironically is traffic, more importantly where the traffic is generated from (known as Backlinks). Backlinks from other websites effect your Authority, if other companies, websites, blogs, and listing pages, link back to your website, Search Engines will find this content and it would improve your overall score, this is know as off page SEO. Having good backlinks is important as this would show good authority, having links from other reputable businesses would be also good for your SEO, think of it as a “word of mouth” referral in modern times. On the other hand having 10 000 backlinks from websites with bad credibility could hurt your SEO rankings.
The final factor is Trust,
as the old saying goes: Trust is Earned, Trust is the hardest commodity to come by as there is very little to be done to effect it. Trust is improved by factors such as reviews, how long your business has been in existence, how many people come to your website naturally, not through other websites. Again only time and continues growth will improve your trust.
Can you improve your own SEO?
The short answer is Yes, anyone who owns a website has the capabilities to improve their website SEO, the How on the other hand is slightly more complicated, We have a whole section dedicated to that if you would like to learn more, but everything you do on your website has some sort of impact to your overall SEO. And can be improved by yourself but will take lots of Research, Changing/ Improving.
How do you improve SEO?
The simplest steps are usually the most effective in regards to SEO, if you are working through a developer, the answer to the technical part of SEO might lie with them, if you did it yourself, you can take steps to improving your SEO and Ranking Higher on Google. The first step is sourcing keywords, keywords are the search terms you want to focus on to rank higher on google, some keywords are very diificult to rank for especially when there are large companies aiming towards the same keywords this is especially true for more lucrative keywords (Products & Services). There are however ways around this enormous hurdle and we always tend to encourage long tail keywords (Coffee pot with Built in filter VS Coffee Pot), exact match search terms (Red Coffee pot for sale online) and Local SEO (Town, City, State, Country), more detail on that here.
After identifying keywords your focus should shift towards implementation, working on your Keyword Density often referred to as KD, by checking to see how your keywords are already doing before making any major changes, you can use a tool like Keyword Checker, which is free to assist you with this.
The other major factor is backlinks, you are able to build backlinks through other referrals, this could be through blog posts, which you can pay companies to do for you (careful though, this could harm your SEO too). Another method would be to make sure you are listed on websites that specifically recommend services like your own or general websites like Yellow pages and the like, it also doesn’t hurt to make sure you are listed on Google and Google Maps.
