SEO for Beginners – Part 1

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is the course of action which affects the appearance of a website or a webpage in a search engine’s search results. It is crucial and necessary. SEO can involve regional search, image search, video search, news search, various business oriented search engines, etc. By implementing SEO in your marketing strategy, it will improve the ranking of your website and aid and quicken the decision making process for busy consumers. SEO is essential in increasing your web presence and ultimately will also increase your revenue. 

As an Internet marketing strategy, SEO reflects  thework of search engines, what people seek for, the exact search terms or keywords entered into search engines and which search engines are favoured by their intended audience. Optimising a website includes content editing as well as HTML and affiliated coding for the purpose of increasing its relevance to particular keywords and to eliminate fences to the indexing activities of search engines. Increasing the number of backlinks, or inbound links, is one more SEO tactic in promoting a website.

The objective of SEO is to establish a pleasant user friendly experience and to inform the search engines of your aims so they can reveal your website in appropriate searches. Search engines are associating users to websites and most relevant content the user’s needs. Relevancy is determined by:

• Content which is determined by the subject that is being given, the text on the webpage, and given titles and descriptions.
• Authority displays quality of the website content to be linked to or for other authoritative sites to use your website as a reference.
• Performance, showing technical side of the website such as speed  and proper functionality.
• Experience defines the look of the website and how easy navigation is, as well as visitors safety. It also shows percentage or numbers of the bounce rate.

Search engine crawlers can store only so much data, so if you are trying to con them, you are probably going to do more damage than benefit in the long term. Things unwanted by search engines are:

• Keyword Stuffing
• Purchased Links
• Poor User Experience

Knowing Your Business Model means just focusing on what their main goals are. You need to define what conversion means to you, weather you are selling a product or providing services, set your goals and be aware of your assets and liabilities.

On-site implementation is very important, but you should not underestimate off-site work as well. You must use multi-channel optimisation. These multi-channel platforms include social media such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, etc…Constant development of appropriate keyword phrases throughout these platforms will focus visitors to use specific phrases you are optimising for as well as help you in your branding efforts.

Domain name is very important to your overall course of action, so as best practice you’re better off using sub-directory root domains (example.com/excellent) versus sub-domains (excellent.example.com). Pay close attention on having consistent domains! If you type in www.example.com, but then your type in just example.com and the “www” does not redirect to www.example.com, that means the search engines are seeing two different sites. This is ineffective for your overall SEO campaign as it will reduce your inbound links, as external sites will link to www.example.com and example.com. One more important thing is to have targeted keywords in your domain as it will only help your overall venture.

Make sure to focus not only on desktop experience but on mobile and tablet optimisation as well as other media. Rich media content like video may get a higher page rank than a plain text page for the same website.

Make your non-text content visible to search engines! (Explanation will be given in upcoming chapters).

Pay attention to title tags and meta descriptions because although meta keywords are largely  ignored by search engines, however are not completely obsolete. Unique meta descriptions speak to that specific page. Duplicated meta descriptions from webpage to webpage will not lead you anywhere.

Title tags should also be unique!

Until next time!

Cheers!