SEO – What is it ? Every single day, millions and millions of people use search engines like google, firefox and safari to find answers to their many questions. Usually, most people click on the first link that they see, or maybe one a bit further down. But have you ever navigated to the mysterious second page of google?
You may or may not be surprised to know that not many people have. Only a measly 2-3% of people actually navigate to the second page of google – that’s not many people at all. The number one result on the SERP (Search Engine Results Page) receives 40-60% of all the traffic for what was searched, which seems very advantageous, especially if you have an online business. Search is quite often the main source of digital traffic, so if you are trying to create an online presence, appearing at the top of the SERP is a very advantageous position to be in. Being at the top may be the best place to be for making yourself known online, but how do you get there?
Search engine optimisation. Now, you may be thinking “What is search engine optimisation?” Well, it is the process of taking getting pages to rank higher in search engines such as Google. How is done? There are a few methods
The first is money. More specifically search engine marketing and pay-per-click. Generally, this is referred to as paid search. If you have sufficient funds or are willing to pay to increase the popularity of your site, you can have your website feature at the top of the results page for certain keywords as an advertisement for your site. This method is quick and easy but costs a pretty penny. Another downside to this method is that the promotion of your site only lasts as long as you’re willing to pay. It’s a very fleeting method of raising the popularity of your site. The more robust method is organic search engine optimisation (SEO). These are the results that appear after the marketed website results. The websites that will stay there for much longer and own much more comfortable seats in the search engine hierarchy.
The organic approach to SEO requires more work and effort than paid search, but it enables you to get that top spot above all other organic results and be the first page that people see after scrolling past the advertisements. The top spot gives you 40-60% on average of all relevant traffic. All links past that receive significantly less traffic. You can optimise ranking personally (You can get our ultimate SEO guide here) or you can get others to do it for you. We at Stylistic would be more than happy to assist.
So, how does organic SEO work? Search engines like Google use algorithms or rules that are used to determine the best results for you based on what you have searched. These algorithms are very complex and take hundreds, if not thousands of parameters and factors to determine the rankings. Despite this, there are 3 main parameters that determine the quality of the site and its position in the ranking.
Links – External links – links from other websites – go quite far in determining the ranking in SEO algorithms. The fact that another site is directing people to your site is viewed as a vote of confidence by the algorithm, as other web designers are usually unlikely to recommend poor quality sites. This vote of confidence works especially well if the site that it comes from ranks highly itself.
Content – This may be a bit of an obvious one, but what is on your website matters. Search engines analyse the content that appears on your page to determine its relevance to any given search. Creating content that takes advantage of the keywords that search engines think users are looking for is very important for raising the rank of your website
Page Structure – This is the third critical component in improving SEO of a website.You may or may not know that web pages are written using a language called HTML. How the HTML is structured can affect how a web page is evaluated. Ensuring that keywords are present in the URL, headers and titles are a few things that you can do to improve your SEO
Now that you know a bit more about search engine optimisation, we hope you realise just how paramount it is to online success and the advantages it has when trying to make the best of your online business or website. If you want to know more about how to become better know online, visit us here, we’d love to talk to you.
