Introduction to Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

What is Search Engine Optimisation?

Search Engine Optimisation or SEO is the process of getting more traffic (visitors) to your website from the organic (free) search engine result pages.

What does SEO Involve?

There are three main parts to SEO;

1. Keyword Research & Website Optimisation
2. Ongoing Content Creation
3. Ongoing Link Building

 

Keyword Research & Website Optimisation

Keyword Research & Website Optimisation is the important first stage of Search Engine Optimisation. This stage makes sure that the search engines can access your website and webpages and understand what they are about so they can properly match searches with the products and services that you offer.

• The Keyword Research section tells us which keywords are the best to target on your website
• The Website Optimisation section tells us how to incorporate those keywords into your website and how to improve other parts of the website to make it perform better in the search engines

Ongoing Content Creation

The second part of SEO, Ongoing Content Creation, goes hand in hand with the third (below). There are several objectives of ongoing content creation;

• To get more relevant keywords onto your website so potential customers have more ways to find you
• To attract and educate potential customers when they are first thinking about buying a product or service and are doing research
• To continue to educate potential customers and encourage them to buy from you
• To make your website a highly useful resource in your industry (this also helps with Link Building)
• To help establish your business as an authority in your industry (this also helps with Link Building)
• To signal to Google that your website is kept up date and relevant

While its possible to do SEO without ongoing content creation, its not recommended because its much more difficult to get results and those results won’t be as significant.

Ongoing Link Building

Link Building is the third part of the Search Engine Optimisation process and goes hand in hand with the second stage; Content Creation (above) because a website with quality content is much easier to attract links to.

Link Building is the process of convincing other websites to link to your website. Search Engines use the number and quality of incoming links to a website as the primary indicator of that website’s quality and authority on their topic. Websites with more incoming links (known as “backlinks” or just “links”) from topically relevant and high quality websites will perform better in search engines.

How Search Engines Work

Search engines have the difficult job of analysing and organising billions of webpages and ranking the top 100 or so every time someone types a query into their search box. Their algorithms are highly secret, very sophisticated and constantly changing but we do know that the factors they consider fall into two basic categories;

• Website Relevancy (if) – is your website relevant to the search query?
• Website Authority & Quality (where) – how does the quality and authority of your website compare with that of the other websites that are also relevant for the search query?

 

Website Relevancy

Your website’s relevancy is determined by analysing whether the keywords in the search query appear on your website and, if so, how prominent they are. For example, if the keyword/s appear in the title of your page, your website will be considered more relevant than if they appeared towards the bottom of a deeper page.

We improve your website relevancy in the first stage of Search Engine Optimisation where we do Keyword Research & Website Optimisation (explained in more detail in the sections above). The second stage of SEO; Ongoing Content Creation, also helps to improve your website relevancy.

Website Quality & Authority

Your website’s authority and quality are more difficult to determine. The search engines look at a range of different factors, particularly the number and quality of incoming links that your webpages have.

We improve your website’s quality and authority by doing Ongoing Content Creation and Ongoing Link Building, the second and third stages of Search Engine Optimisation (explained in more detail in the sections above).