The pandemic has definitely made it necessary for businesses to focus on their online presence - more than ever before. But saying that, even way before Covid, we saw a major increase in everything moving online. So, it's a good idea for you to get on board and get a website set up for your business. Or perhaps you’ve got an existing website to revive. And, so, one of the ways to get (and keep) people visiting your website is with SEO. And chances are, you’ve come across this term somewhere along the way. But what does it actually entail? In this blog, we’ll explain what SEO is, why its important, how it works and the techniques and tools you can use to help you.

What is SEO?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation, which is the process of improving your website to increase its visibility when people search for products or services related to your business in Google, Yahoo!, Bing, and other search engines. The better visibility your web pages have in search results, the more likely you are to attract prospective and existing customers to your business.

How does SEO work?

Search engines use crawlers (sometimes referred to as bots or spiders) to gather information about all the content they can find on the internet. The crawler starts from a known web page and follows internal links to pages within that website as well as the external links to pages on other sites. The content on those pages, plus the context of the links used, help the crawlers understand what each page is about and how it’s connected to all of the other pages in the search engine’s database. This is called an index.

When a user types in their query into the search box, the search engine uses advanced algorithms to find the most accurate and useful list of results for that query. And it's important to note that these organic results can include web pages full of text, news articles, images, videos, and other types of content found online.

These algorithms have evolved to be extremely complex over the years, and take into account hundreds and thousands of different ranking factors to determine the rankings of their Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). However, there are three core metrics that search engines examine to determine the quality of the website and how it should rank:

• Content - Search engines will analyse the content of a webpage to determine if it would be relevant for any given search query. And a large part of SEO is in creating content that is targeted towards the keywords that users are searching for.
• Page structure - The second core component of SEO is page structure. This is because webpages are written in HTML code and how this code is structured can impact a search engine’s ability to evaluate a web page. The search engine will evaluate the use of relevant keywords in the title(s), headers of the page, the URLs and will make sure that the website is crawlable.
• Links - Links to other pages as well as links from other websites play a key role in determining the ranking of a website in every search engine. The reason being, a link can be seen as a vote of confidence and supports the quality of the information provided. Websites that acquire links from high volume of external sites gain authority in the eyes of search engines.

The Top SEO Techniques

Now you have a better understanding on how search engines work, it's important to know that that is the first step of the process in improving a website's search rankings. Actually improving a site's rank involves leveraging various SEO techniques to optimise the site for search. These techniques are:

• Keyword research - Keyword research is often the starting point for improving SEO. This involves looking at what keywords a website is already ranking for, what keywords the competitors rank for, and what other keywords potential customers are searching for. For more on this, check out our blog on the keyword research tools we recommend you use - simply click HERE to be redirected to it.
• Link building - Because links from external websites are one of the core ranking factors for all the major search engines, obtaining high-quality links is SEO gold. For more information and advice for link building, click HERE.
• On-page optimisation - Improving the structure of the page can have incredible benefits for SEO. Common on-page optimisation techniques include optimising the URL of the page to incorporate keywords, updating the titles of the pages to use relevant terms that are searched, and using the alt attribute to label images used on the page.
• Content marketing - This involves updating existing content or creating brand new pieces of content that users want to see. This is because Google and other search engines are always looking for high-quality content. Therefore, it's important to research what content is already out there and create a compelling piece of content that provides a great user experience and has a chance of ranking higher in the search engine results. Also note that good content has a greater chance of being shared on social media - great for SEO.
• Semantic markup - Semantic markup is used to describe the meaning behind the content on a page. This means helping to identify who the author of the content is or the topic/ type of content on a page. Using semantic markup can help with getting rich detailed snippets displayed in the search results page (i.e., text, reviews and even images). Rich snippets in the SERPs doesn't have an impact on search rankings, but can improve the rate of organic traffic.
• Site architecture optimisation - Internal links play a large role in SEO as well. Making sure key pages are being linked to and that relevant anchor text is being used in those links can help improve a page's relevance for specific terms and phrases.

Top SEO tools

There are many SEO tools out there that help with optimising website performance. Here are just some of the commonly used free and paid tools:

• Google Search Console - this is a Google original tool that provides rankings and traffic reports for top keywords and pages, and can help identify and fix technical issues on the site.
• Answer the Public - provides a huge list of long-tail keyword opportunities, plus common questions asked associated with a word you type in in the search box.
• Google PageSpeed Insights - informs you of the loading time and performance for an URL on desktop and mobile. It then grades the website’s performance on a score from 0 - 100 on how fast it takes to load the site according to different metrics, and also suggests areas for improvements.
• Ahrefs SEO toolbar - is a free Chrome and Firefox extension that allows you to check for broken links for any webpage, as well as generating an on-page SEO report that includes the webpage’s title, headers, word count, meta description and much more.
• Google Keyword Planner - is a great tool to use for SEO since it provides keyword suggestions and keyword search volume for its users.
• Moz Local Listing Score - generates data from more than 10 different sources—including Google, Yelp, and Facebook—to score your brick-and-mortar business on how it looks online. Results come complete with actionable fixes for inconsistent or incomplete listings.
• Google Analytics - tracks pretty much every bit of traffic you can imagine on your website—where it comes from, which page is receiving the most traffic and so on. Therefore making it a helpful tool to track if you’re getting traffic from organic search.