SEO is a term that you will see everywhere as part of digital marketing but do you actually know what it means and how it affects your website? Standing for Search Engine Optimisation, SEO is the process of optimising your website and domain to improve the amount of web traffic you receive through search engines – think if you run a Furniture store and someone searches ‘furniture near me’, you want to appear towards the top of the results, being optimised will help this. This type of traffic is called Organic and is ultimately better than paid traffic as it is free but much harder to achieve – especially in a crowded sector.
We will explain the different types of SEO, explaining what they are and how they can be improved to increase your Search Engine ranking:
On-site SEO
Onsite SEO refers to elements within web pages. This can be the page structure and titles, keywords and meta descriptions. While these all might sound confusing, it essentially means how friendly is your page to search engines.
A search engine will figure out what is on a page through a process called indexing. This means that is will use programs called crawlers to visit your site and gain information about it. If the items mentioned above are not best optimised for a page – an example being that a H1 Header Tag being used multiple times across a page – Google will not rank it as highly as a page that has all this in order.
Offsite SEO
Offsite, as the name suggests, is elements that exist away from your website. This can be Social Media mentions, offline mentions of your brand and back links. Backlinks are particularly important and even something you may have come across. You may receive emails from organisations claiming to have 1000’s of reputable links to point at your website. This however can hurt as much as you may think it will help! Backlinks are essentially links from other websites to yours. The more you have, the theory is the more reputable you are. However, search engines are smarter than this and will quantify the quality of your backlinks – having bad links can negatively affect your rank!
Technical SEO
The final point is Technical SEO, this is the simplest part as it refers to your pages technical ability – how quick does it load? Are your images correctly sized and optimised? A tools to measure this is Google’s PageSpeed Insight which helps you determine how you can improve your site’s performance.
Conclusion
We hope that has cleared up the basics of what SEO and how you can go about improving your own! However, SEO is not a simple task that you can do once and be done with, it is about continuous improvement over the lifecycle of the website. We can assist in improving your SEO – get in touch for a free discussion with Magpie IT & Digital Marketing.