Concepts

This section explains the concepts associated with the services that we offer. However, before you go any further, you should be aware that the true workings of the Search Engines are highly secret and constantly changing so any SEO advice written anywhere is at least partly speculative. Read more about this at our page on SEO Knowledge.

Contents;

Search Engine Optimisation

Search Engines look at hundreds of factors when ranking websites but they fall into two basic categories;

  • Website relevancy (mostly concerned with on-site factors)
  • Website authority (mostly concerned with off-site factors)

When someone makes a search query on Google (or another search engine), they first determine which sites in their index are relevant to the query then they rank the websites based on a combination of their degree of relevancy and their level of authority or trustworthiness. The higher ranking websites have the best combination of high relevancy and high authority.

Website Relevancy

Increasing your website relevancy involves determining which are the best keywords to target (keyword research) then incorporating them into your webpages in the right places (website optimisation), namely;

  • Page Titles
  • Page Headings
  • URLs
  • Content
  • Img names and alt tags

If your industry, or the keywords you choose to target, have very low competition then working on your website relevancy (on-site SEO) may be all that you have to do. If a search engine finds that several websites are relevant for the same search query (keyword), it needs to decide which website it should rank higher and which lower, it does this by looking at the ‘authority’ of the different websites. The more competitive your market is, the more you have to work on increasing your website authority.

Website Authority

Search engines look at many different factors to determine a website’s authority but the most important ones are;

  • Incoming links – quality over quantity
  • Social signals – likes, tweets and +1s

Once you have your website relevancy under control, its time to start trying to get links to and social shares of your webpages (link building). A good way to kick this off is to start a blog and write regular (2-4/month) articles (content creation) and sharing them on social media (content marketing). The idea is that interesting and informative content will attract links and social shares.

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