SEO is critical to the success of your business, so knowing and understanding exactly how it works is essential if you want to increase traffic to your website. This guide aims to shed some light on the complexities of search engine optimisation so that you can better understand how to improve your SEO approach.
What Exactly is SEO?
SEO is the internet’s way of helping users to find what they are looking for. For instance, if you are searching for a chocolate cake recipe, the search engines will provide you with the results of two things:
- The recipes in its database
- The most popular sites
As a business owner your intention is to be both relevant and popular in search engine results. One way of doing this is to optimise your rankings in search engines.
A Brief History of SEO
Traditionally, people used to stuff keywords into their websites to trick search engines. Since search engine algorithms were quite simple back then, the search engines weren’t smart enough to detect such activity, and sent web users to those sites.
Obviously, site users became frustrated at being directed to poor quality websites, and as a result, Google (and other search engines) made some important changes to their rules. Search engines improved their algorithms to detect keyword-stuffed websites, eliminating them from the search engine results pages altogether and only directing users to high-quality websites.
What does this mean for today’s website owners?
The algorithmic changes made mean that website owners need to focus on creating high quality websites that contain relevant, well written content.
Keywords play a very important role in your website’s Search Engine Optimisation success but this doesn’t mean that you should stuff them haphazardly into your site’s pages. Make sure that they contribute to the overall meaning of your website. You should also include your keywords into your site’s URLs, the title tags, image names and page headers.
Other techniques that you should employ include inserting meta data (including a meta title and a meta description).
How to Find the Right Keywords
To find the right keywords simply ask yourself what products or services you offer to your clients. From here, branch out as far as you want, creating a list of relevant keywords and keyword phrases. Avoid focusing on broad term s– opt for more specific keyword phrases as this is where you will gain the highest search engine results.
Finally, always create authentic, interesting content that your readers will want to read. Ultimately, this is what will drive traffic to your website and improve your SEO results.
Discover our other related articles:
Search Engine Optimisation: SEO Rules for 2014
Google’s Search Engine Optimisation Basics you Need to Follow
Related articles.
