Understanding Basic SEO
Transcript of Understanding Basic SEO
Understanding Basic SEO
What is SEO?• SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation
• It is a set of techniques and practices that make it easier for search engines to analyse your site, helping the search engines to better access and understand your content.
• As well as improving your websites reputation and authority by getting links from other websites and establishing a presence on other social media platforms.
• The goal for most is to improve your search engine ranking and search results, typically bringing more traffic to your website and generating more customers.
Is SEO Guaranteed Success?
• The answer to this is NO, SEO is not a guaranteed success.
• There are many ranking factors with many websites competing against each other, as you can imagine!
• However, SEO does not guarantee a better search rank, but it does improve your chances of ranking you well.
Understanding Key Words & The Role
They Play
Keywords
• Keywords are the words or phrases users enter into search engines to find what they are looking for.
• When creating your websites SEO plan, its useful to put together a keyword research list of words and phrases, to find out what potential customers are looking for and which keywords you would like your website to compete against.
Keyword ListStart by creating a keyword list. Here are some guidelines to keep in mind:
• General keywords will have higher monthly searches, but also higher competition, for example, Plumber, Builder, Carpenter, Accountant and so on…
• Specific keywords will have lower monthly searches, but less competition, for example, emergency plumber A J Wallbank or emergency dentist N J James and so on…
• Aim for specific, lower competition keywords for your business.
Research KeywordsYou can research potential keywords and phrases using a
tool like Google Ad Words Keyword Planner. This is a free tool.
Research KeywordsEnter a keyword or phrase from your list, for example, emergency plumber A J Wallbank
Here, you can see how many times this keyword or phrase is used in a given month.
KeywordsPay attention to the keyword ideas as you may find
keywords that are more popular or have more monthly searches. Add in any new keywords to your list.
How Search Engines See & Index Your Website
Website IndexingWhen you look at a website, you’ll probably
see something like this.
Website Indexing• You see a large title, a picture of a plumber and you
quickly know that this is a website to do with plumbing.
• However, search engines don’t see websites in the same way. They only see the code behind them, like below.
• From this code they need to make a determination about what the website is about.
Website IndexingThe title and the text appear pretty much the same as the
search engines. Looking at paragraph tags or heading tags, they can tell which text is more prominent on the page.
Search engines see prominent headings and titles as more important as to what your website is about.
Website IndexingHere’s what an image looks like in code. Whilst search
engines can’t see the image itself, they can read the name of the image file and also tread the ‘alt’ tag that describes
what the image is about.
Website Indexing
There are few things in the above code that do not appear on your website. For example, the ‘HTML Title’ names your web page and also appears in the website tab above your website page. Naturally you will want to put your business name here, but you should also consider adding some of your keywords in here too.
Website IndexingThe ‘Meta Description’ is what is used to describe what
you do in the list of searches, as shown below.
Not only do you want to use this as an opportunity to use some of
your keywords, but also an opportunity to commit search
users to click on your link. So put on your sales hat and make your
page sound appealing!
These are all small steps, but when combined can make a big difference to how search engines can
access and analyse your websites content.
This will help you get found more easily and hopefully bring more traffic to your website and ultimately
creating more sales for you!
Small Steps
Thank you for listening. I hope this was educational
and informative.
Any questions?