A Beginner’s Guide to Search Engine Optimisation

A Beginner’s Guide to Search Engine Optimisation
A Beginner’s Guide to Search Engine Optimisation

When someone goes looking for information online, more often than not, they will turn to a search engine and type in a few words or a phrase to answer their question. As a business, you want your target audience to be able to find your website in those search results, but how can you get your website to rank?

In fact, organic search drives, so implementing good SEO strategies is key to getting your audience’s eyes on your website. Avoiding bad practices will keep search engines like Google from penalising your site and pushing it down in ranking, effectively hiding it from your target audience and potential customers. To ensure that you avoid this and don’t see your business struggling to compete against other businesses who are taking the internet by a storm make sure you understand exactly how you make good practice of SEO.

The advice provided in this guide will enable you to understand exactly what Search Engine Optimisation does for your website and how it can help raise your website’s ranking.

Keyword research

In order to implement proper SEO strategies, you need to know which keywords your target audience is using to search, otherwise, how will you know what questions they need answering or which problems they need solving?

You can do keyword research by using tools like Google’s Keyword Planner and search for high- and medium-volume keywords. Make a list of the most relevant ones, but make sure you aren’t choosing the ones that are highly competitive. For example, if your business sells mattresses and your audience is searching using the keyword ‘mattress for sale,’ but it has an incredibly high number of searches, you can lessen the competition by localising the keyword to ‘mattress for sale Leeds,’ which has considerably fewer searches.

Once you’ve figured out which keywords you want to rank for, you can move onto implementing strategies.

Optimising website content

Having good, quality website content is just about the most important aspect to consider when trying to achieve good SEO. You should include keywords in a natural way without practicing keyword stuffing, while also writing content that answers your visitor’s questions. Your content should also be optimised for conversions, and should help guide your visitors into taking the actions you want them to take, for example purchasing or subscribing.

It can be tricky to write quality content for your website and blog, so if you don’t have the time, skillset, or resources to do this properly, it might be a wise decision to bring in professional help, like Search Engine Marketing.

Outsourcing to a company that can help boost your rankings on google will enable you to focus on other aspects of your business. Being in their safe hands you should see more traffic being driven to your website due to the combination of both the quality of quantity of content that is being produced in your name.

They will ensure that they get the right balance and that any content is always going to be optimised for Google.

Title tags and meta descriptions

Your website’s title tags and metadata helps search engines index your pages, but they also show up in search results to help give people an idea of what your website is about. It’s often the first bit of information visitors will see from your website, so if you want them to click through the search engine results page (SERP) into your site, your title tags and meta descriptions should be clear and succinct, while also including keywords you want to rank for.

Backlinking

Also known as link building, backlinking is essentially getting other websites to link back to yours. However, you don’t want just any website to backlink to your website. It’s preferable to have quality over quantity here because Google won’t determine your site to be useful if low-quality, spammy websites are backlinking to yours. Instead, you want your backlinks to come from high-quality, informative, and authoritative websites to show search engines that your website has some social proof.

While it’s difficult to control the number of backlinks you receive, you can focus on a long-term strategy to build links. Writing a blog that’s consistently full of useful, engaging, and well-written information that your audience finds helpful can entice other websites and users to share your content around the web.

With a basic knowledge to how search engine optimisation works, you should be able to see just how much it can help your online business grow and reach new customers.

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