What is SEO? Your beginner's guide to search engine optimisation.

SEO is a word you might’ve heard of, or even begun to research, but you’re not entirely sure where to begin. With SEO comes a lot of technical jargon, but when you break it down, everyone has the ability to improve their website rankings, even if just by one step. 

We’ve created a beginner's guide to SEO, so you can learn a bit more about how you can give your website the extra hand it needs to climb up the rankings and gain more visitor traffic.

What is SEO?

SEO stands for search engine optimisation, but to put it simply, SEO is about increasing your chance of getting more visitors from search engines organically. The better your SEO, the more likely you are to get higher organic rankings on Google, which can lead to higher profile traffic, and hopefully, higher conversions.

There are three main ways you can improve your SEO and that is your technical SEO, on-page SEO and off-page SEO. 

What is technical SEO?

Technical SEO is the way you make sure search engines can find, access, and rank your website. This is to do with features like your website structure, page load speeds and how ‘easy’ your website is to navigate. If you are having technical difficulties with any of your website performance, this can prevent Google’s ability to crawl your website and rank it; which pretty much means you might not show up in the search engine at all.

The most simple stage of this is to make sure your website is well-organised, accessible to Google, and works as a website should. If you have any doubts about your website’s performance, this is the first step you want to look at fixing. 

One easy way to begin looking at this is through Google’s own tool PageSpeed Insights.  

What is on-page SEO?

On-page SEO is making sure your webpages are optimised to what people are searching for, which can affect where you can rank on the SERP (search engine results page) and also what people see when they click on your website.

The main component of on-page SEO is your keywords. First, you need to define keywords that people are searching for. You can do this on platforms such as Semrush or Google Search Console. It is important to pick keywords that are ranking high, but are also relevant to your brand. If you pick random keywords just because they are popular at that time, Google could actually penalise your website’s rankings for their relevance. 

When you narrow down your keyword, it is then important you add it in various places on your page, such as title tags, your meta description, your URL slug, the main headline, within the body of your text and in image alt texts where relevant. 

What is off-page SEO?

Off-page SEO is the rankings that don’t come from your own website, but from websites that backlink to your site. Backlinking is where people include the link to your site on their own, and it is the most essential part of off-page SEO.

Backlinks make a significant difference in a website's ability to rank, and this is a great way to increase your authority score (which basically defines how ‘important’ your website is). The most important backlinks are the ones with a high-scoring referring domain; so if a high-ranking website links your site, it basically tells Google your website is also reliable and trustworthy.

There are many different ways to get backlinks, but one is in your public relations efforts. If a news publication covers your story, or you provide expert commentary for them, and they link to your website, this is an organic, follow link, which is the best type for your page rankings. If you need help on how to improve your PR, get in contact today. 

This was just a quick overview of the basics you need to know about SEO, but if you want to learn more about how you can take your SEO to the next level, get in contact with us today at hello@chapterii.agency