Beginner's Guide to Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

If you've never experienced the need to elicit a piece of information or a solution to a problem from an Internet browser, then you must be living under a rock! When we surf the Net for an answer, we tend to stick to the pattern of boiling our need down to a string of words or phrases that formulate a query. Right?

Next, we type our query in the search box and browse through the first results page for matches. But have you ever wondered how that very result you ended up clicking assumed a place in the top options?

Ask SEO. She knows!

Let's get this clear: no, SEO is not a typo for CEO. Standing for Search Engine Optimisation, it designates the process by which you can refine your website to get "free", organic traffic, i.e. visitors, from a search engine (e.g. Google or Bing).

Essentially, SEO helps increase your business’ visibility on SERPs (search engine results pages) to achieve more clicks, leads and conversions. It makes sure that when someone enters relevant queries into the search engine, your site shows up on the top of the results page.

What's the importance of SEO?

Every website has numerous traffic sources. Some of them come in the form of buttons for click-throughs via your social media, while others are referrals from links on other sites, say, a news page. There's also the direct traffic in which your prospective client directly types your business name into the search bar and lands on your site.

A website that abides by SEO best practices is user-friendly, as it's more visible and reliable than others which fall through the cracks and appear, for instance, on the seventh page.

How does SEO work?

Back in the day, when SEO first emerged, all web owners had to do was shove a boatload of keywords to their content and they were good to go. Not anymore, especially since search engines began to consider a slew of criteria when assessing the quality of a website.

The role of a search engine such as Google is to sift through gazillion of pieces of content and bring to the forefront the best ones depending on what the user is seeking. This process of searching and extracting pages that contain your keywords or their synonyms is three-fold:

Crawling

The sophisticated algorithms of search engines dubbed as crawlers, spiders, or simply search engine ranking factors (you ain't fancy; you can't sit with us) will comb through the web for relevant copy, evaluating the content and coding of each URL.

Indexing

Then, these bots will arrange and try to understand the content they've picked up. Remember that to be entitled to appear on the results page, a site must be in the index.

Ranking

Finally, when a search is performed, search engines scour the many trillions of stored documents and showcase to the user a bundle of results they believe will best answer their search queries. Note that the results which satisfy what we call the "searcher's intent" are assorted from the most to the least relevant.

We're all likely to click on and explore a webpage that is among the first (if not the first) choices in search results, aren't we? Users trust search engines, so ranking in the top positions breeds loyalty and credibility for your website, blog, or online store. This also facilitates your off-site SEO – that is, your webpage's social promotion across your media channels.

Why is Google important?

Every search engine ensures it delivers high-quality results to web users, while each of them has its own guidelines with respect to SEO. For this reason, and with a proven whopping 75% of the total search market share, Google is the tech champion. Therefore, you're advised to be attentive to the kind of SEO norms it conforms to.

The E-A-T Logic

Among Google’s chief ranking factors is that of E-A-T – Expertise, Authority and Trustworthiness. The search engine trawls and serves up websites or blogs that only meet such requirements.

As long as you demonstrate a consistent tone of voice, a great command of grammar and a user-friendly webpage based on keyword-targeted copy, then you’re very close to establishing what’s viewed as a high-quality site. Failure to do so may not only have a negative impact to your domain authority and rankings, but could also affect your audience growth and engagement.

Simply put, the better the quality of your site, the higher you'll rank in the results and the more traffic, with newsletter readers and/or paying members, you'll generate.

SEO strategies

Now that you have your line-up of keywords, it's time to optimise your content. But crushing a website's SEO ain't easy task, hunny. In fact, there's an inexhaustible list of technical details to be taken into account, including the annoying "Page not found" messaging for 404 errors, or pages that are too slow to load. For the record, the page response time shouldn't go beyond the 0.4-second time restriction. Anything more than this is harmful to search engine bots and results in poor user experience. We reserve these for another article though, so stay tuned!

In this post, we’ll focus on two major SEO strategies – site architecture and content optimisation. If done properly, these two on-site elements can make it easy for search engine crawlers to discover and understand the meaning as well as the context of your webpage.

Site architecture

When you hear "site architecture", what's the first thing that pops into your head? That's correct! The structure of a webpage. Not unlike Spongebob and Patrick, SEO and UX (or else, user experience) are inseparable. Not only does a great site architecture reflect an error-free site, but also it assists search engines and users in terms of page navigation.

How to structure and navigate your site

Page structure should be tackled logically. You should carefully organise your categories and sub-categories, as well as what should be placed where. As far as the naming of your pages is concerned, it’s equally important to create clickable, SEO-enrich URLs. Let's take a look at some tips:

• Don't use capital letters

• Join words with a hyphen

• Your URLs should be neat and short (do not exceed the 65 characters)

• Make your URL name as specific and unique as your originality permits by including your main keyword

Now that you've crossed structure and naming off your checklist, it's the right moment to ask yourself: "Are my pages interlinked?". Imagine that you’ve got a site dedicated to dogs. You might want to link to pages that revolve around dog accessories (e.g. leashes), training programmes and veterinary clinics. This will both improve your on-page SEO and boost your site usability.

Page structure

Your final product should be a page that's readable, with skimmable formatting and an aesthetically appealing layout. Be minimalistic by avoiding garish logos, as they're harsh on the eye. Suitable alternatives are images, bulleted points and in-text headings, all of which eliminate long-drawn-out paragraphs.

Out of the three, headings are perhaps the most significant. Your content management system (CMS) equips you with particular heading options filtered according to content hierarchy – these are identified as H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, H6.

Each webpage includes one H1 that sums up your topic for both the search engine and the user. We suggest that you treat H1 as your title. The rest of your headers should be intuitively and linearly set out to give a clue to search engine bots and readers about the focus of each section, and how related they are to the previous ones. Let us make the use of a H1, H2 and H3 clear with an example:

H1: How to Make the Perfect Cup of Coffee (this is the title that reveals what the page is about).

H2: Ways to Brew Brazilian Coffee Beans (found at the next level down, this header covers a sub-topic of the parent topic).

H3: Use an air compressor (further down – a paragraph demonstrating how to brew Brazilian coffee beans).

If you haven't deployed all the choices in the headers range, do not despair! Most pages will get away with just their H1 and a few H2s. That doesn't mean that you should ignore them or use them sparingly. If anything, headers are here to serve a purpose: to make it easier for our crawling buddies to detect and present your page to whoever is searching for it. So next time you feel like merely bolding, italicising and/or underlining your text, think twice.

Content Optimisation

Sites with a great structure and navigation are good, but those that also have SEO-optimised content are better! Below are our must-DOs!

Quality over Quantity

Whatever the technical issues, you should never lose sight of your objective: to add value. For this reason, your copy has to be laid out in ways that make it graspable. To do so, you need to be a grammar, spelling and punctuation junkie; all three of them must be on-point at all times.

Next up, is your tone of voice – namely, the personality of your brand. How would you like to communicate with your audience? In a conversational manner? Formally? Poetically?

Keyword research

As already mentioned, keywords are words or phrases that users enter into a search bar. So, if you want to get the SEO ball rolling, start with keyword research. The task of tracking the keywords that your clients are looking for, and which relate to your company, is quite random; but to add and cleverly spread them across your site is strategic enough to lead the person searching for your product or service straight to your web pages.

There is an ocean of keyword explorer tools available that’ll help you decide on the type of keywords you should be using. You can also monitor your competitors' activity, or brainstorm concepts that could possibly cater to your customer's needs.

Link building

Link building describes the practice of incorporating links to your webpage from other websites (also referred to as backlinks or hyperlinks). In order to rank your site, search engines first look at the anchor texts, i.e., the actual text attached to a link. If the text is keyword-driven, it will benefit your rankings in any search engine. Links that stem from a reputable, trusted source, such as another good-quality website, have a stronger ranking likelihood than those with spam-like paid links.

Title Tags and Meta Descriptions

Title tags and meta descriptions are located in the search engine results pages, as opposed to on your homepage or elsewhere in your site. These few lines offer an overview of what your page is about. Think of the above title tags and their meta descriptions as blurbs on the back of a book. Given that your meta description can determine whether someone will click on your page or will skip it for the next result down on the SERP, it’s crucial to audit and make it as descriptive and attractive as possible.

SEO pitfalls

Whereas there are multiple SEO tactics you can leverage to maximise your user experience and be rewarded with a high ranking position, there are also dodgy methods to reach that same goal.

Keyword stuffing

This is the process of bunging a load keywords on your pages in a non-methodical way. Suppose that you're a bakery owner, selling single-serving cakes in South London. Google can see right through your excessive stuffing of the phrase “delicious cupcakes in South London” into the copy, while disregarding vital content aspects such as text flow, and won't take kindly to it. So beware and don't over "keyword" your content!

Takeaway: keyword stuffing does more harm than good.

Self-created backlinks

While natural links from partner websites or fellow bloggers are instrumental to site traffic, self-created or unnatural links are anything but this. You’re most likely to see those noxious lil' devils hidden in directories and info graphics, or wedged among non-moderated comments.

Duplicate content

If plagiarism in academic work is penalised, the same goes for duplicate content. Anything that's been copy and pasted from another website is dismissed by search engines. End of story.

Those automated bad boys show no mercy!

Conclusion

Search engines are tech-savvier than never before, so any attempt to trick them will be futile. High-value, useful and shareable content wins every time, so you better prioritise on that – for the convenience of the search androids and your potential clients.

Share this blog post and ask questions — do you already obey SEO rules? If not, how about following our beginner's guide and starting today?

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