Ever wondered what SEO stands for and what it is? Find out all about SEO, right here.
One of the most popular services that the internet offers is search engines. Yes, alongside social media, search engines are a huge titan on the web, and allow users from all over the world to have their queries answered, with relevant results – whether it be web links, images, video and more. Search engines have changed the way both users and businesses use the internet. But, what does it all mean?
We’ve asked an SEO expert all about what SEO is. In this post, we’ll look into all things SEO. Everything from what is means, why you should be interested in it and more. So, let’s dive into the world of digital marketing, and learn about SEO, below.
What is SEO?
SEO stands for search engine optimisation. Put simply, it’s the process of improving a website for search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo (to name a few). Through both technical and creative work, SEO can help a site move up the rankings on search engines– without using search engine advertising.
There are primarily 2 types of listings on search engines: paid and unpaid. Paid listings are advertisements located at the top of search engine results pages, they’re usually marked with ‘ad’. This is a completely different thing to SEO – it’s called PPC (pay per click), but that’s a whole other thing for a different post.
As for unpaid listings, these are presented on search engine results pages by their relevancy. The first results you see after searching for something, after the ads, is considered the most relevant result to your query. So, if you’re looking for an ‘seo company in london’ it’s thought that the first results will have the most relevant content to your search. What SEO can do is help your website move further up the organic rankings on search engines, without using advertising. But, with search engines constantly changing, results differ all the time, which is why ongoing SEO work is vital.
How SEO works?
First, it’s important to understand how search engines work before knowing how SEO works. Search engines collect and index data from a website, then store it waiting for someone to type in a search query. In a matter of seconds, thousands of results are returned, ranking the most relevant. The way search engines determine relevance is by crawling websites collected data to index it. They’ll look at the content on the site and how the site is linked together in order to determine its relevancy and rank. There’s a lot of different things that go into SEO work, which we’ll outline in this section.
Link Building
Link building comes in two parts: onsite and offsite. Onsite link building is about making sure that your site logically links together. Search engine robots use links to navigate your site, which means they can move around your site more easily to index it. A good website will have clear links to almost every page, navigating your site easily.
Next there’s offsite link building. This is about getting links to other relevant sites on your own. Through both external and internal link building, a site can be optimised and improved.
If you’re just starting out, or don’t have an experienced SEO team in-house, you’ll want to consider hiring an agency that provides link building services.
Content Creation
Search engine robots crawl across content, looking for keywords and key phrases that are relevant to a user’s search query. Through creating content, whether it be website content or blogs, it can help search engines to index data about your site, in order to determine its relevance for users.
Technical Work
There’s more that goes into SEO behind the scenes, and it gets very complex and detailed, hence why most hire an SEO expert to carry out their strategies. Including things such as META tags and data, as well as working on website coding as well (we’d be here all day if we had to explain it all). All you need to know is that there is something basic SEO work that can be done off your own back, and some that requires an expert to handle.
Why is ranking important?
There’s a saying amongst digital marketers, the best place to hide a dead body is on page 2 of Google… It’s because most users will only interact with the first page of search engine results. Whether they click an ad or organic searches, it’s the first few results that are clicked and people rarely make it to page 2 whilst searching. But, you may wonder if ads get you to the top of search engine pages, then why not just work on that? Well, it can be expensive as you pay every time your ad is clicked. Ranking organically ensures that you’re not paying every time someone visits your website through search engines. SEO can help boost your website’s ranking for relevant keywords and help move up to the top spots.
