What?

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a term lots of digital marketers use when referring to the process of using best practises and strategies in order to rank higher in Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs), resulting in higher visitors to their websites.

 

Why?

Google has virtual ‘bots’ that crawl through your website, using over 200 ranking factors to determine how highly your page should rank. Working with those factors can help your page appear above competitors’, resulting in your page being more likely to be clicked on, as the graph below shows.

By maximising the number of people that visit your business online, you not only increase brand awareness, but also the opportunities for customers to buy from you.

 

How?

Google tend to be a bit coy about confirming which factors affect ranking the most, but during a recent Q&A with Google’s Andrey Lipattsev, it was announced that the two most important factors are links and content.

 

In addition to these two crucial factors, below are a few factors that can be used in order to follow SEO best practises- the more, the merrier!

 

On-page Optimisation

 

Keywords

Joe Friedlein from Browser Media highlights the importance of keyword targeting, explaining that each page should have a few specific keywords that feature:

• in the page title in the browser window above the URL bar
• in the title of the article on the page
• once or twice in the main text on the page, along with synonyms

 

Main Content

Sprinkling a few alternatives to your keywords in to your text helps reinforce what your page is about. Each page should have a specific theme and focus on a few keywords, and those keywords should not be on every page. If they are, you risk diluting your results and giving the bots mixed messages, which could mean the wrong pages are optimised for the wrong terms.

If you use your keywords so much that the text flows unnaturally and becomes unintelligible (known as Keyword Stuffing), Google may frown upon your website and give you a lower ranking.

 

Layout

Google rewards users who break down large chunks of text using paragraphs, bullet points and images. In addition to this, using title tags like <h1> help their bots get a better idea of what your webpages are about. There should only ever be one <h1> tag per page, or else you risk confusing bots and customers with conflicting messages.

If you’d like to see what pieces your website is made of (and check out what bits you aren’t using), Freeformers have created a Table of Elements for you to copy and paste your website’s URL and learn more.

 

Example

The example Lauren Smith (from The Original Wordsmith) uses when explaining on-page optimisation is a cake and cupcake bakery that produces a gluten-free range. The keywords and synonyms are underlined so you can see how they all work together.

Page Title:	Gluten-Free Cakes and Cupcakes
Article Title:	<h1>Our Gluten-Free Range</h1>
Main Content:	All of our cakes and cupcakes are available gluten-free. We work hard to ensure all of our yummy sweets and treats are available for everyone to enjoy. If you have a different allergy or intolerance you’d like us to cater for, feel free to get in touch and we can arrange custom-made desserts for you.

 

Behind The Scenes

 

Links

Links connect webpages, and are regarded as a sign of trust by Google. Make sure you link credible sources, and that the content you link actually relates to what you’re talking about (do NOT pay a company to link to your business from random and unrelated websites).

 

Image Description

Using the alt tag in the image brackets to describe the picture in the article not only helps visually impaired people who use a narrator to read out the contents of a webpage, it also helps bots work out what the image is, as they are just tools programmed to crawl through text and can’t see visual representations, meaning they need the pictures to tell them what they are.

Image (as it appears on website):
HTML (behind the scenes):	<img src”http://filedomain/exampleupload/Pastries.jpg” alt=”Cinnamon Pastries” width=”200″ height=”200″>

 

 

Domain Ownership & Hosting

Google may hesitate to rank your web domain highly if you have only purchased your web domain for a year, compared to a more long-term ownership. This is because Google will have more confidence to promote a business that has established a brand and committed to it.

In addition to this, having a web host that is able to provide fast page-loading times will also reflect positively in where your business features in SERPs. Lauren Smith recommends Site5, as they do all the hard bits for you like migrating your site over.

 

If you’d like to see a more comprehensive list of what you can do to improve your Google Ranking, check out the Periodic Table of SEO Success Factors. In addition, Google have supplied a great guide to get you started on your SEO adventure.

 

References

Chaffey, D. & Ellis-Chadwick, F. (2012) Digital Marketing: Strategy, Implementation & Practise. 5^th ed, Harlow: Pearson