Search engine optimisation (SEO) isn’t something that you should be dabbling in, but rather something you should be doing. A lot of people think SEO is just about writing optimized code and adding some tags to your website, but if you really want it to work for you, there’s a lot of work involved. You need to think about how people will find your website so that a high number of relevant visitors come through the door each month; then it’s up to them whether they stay or go.
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Finally, once everything is working as well as possible and generating enough revenue, don’t stop; keep improving things all the time so that they get better and better over time!
Define your value proposition
It’s important to know who you’re trying to reach with your content and what they want, so the first step is defining your value proposition. One thing that’s easy to forget is that SEO isn’t just about keywords; it’s also about audience. Depending on the type of business you run, you may want to target a very specific audience—such as homeowners in Glasgow over 60 years old—or a more general one—like homeowners in Glasgow over 60 years old who love dogs! It all depends on what kind of marketing message you’re trying to send out there into the world.
Find the right keywords
The next step is to find the right keywords for your business. This is the process of selecting the best words and phrases that people use when searching for products or services like yours.
Once you’ve chosen your focus keyword, you need to check whether there are enough people searching for it online. You can do this by using a keyword research tool such as Google’s Keyword Planner or SEMrush (not free). These will show how many people are using specific search terms every month, which websites rank best in SERPs (search engine results pages), and other useful information about each term’s popularity and competitiveness.
Use these tools together with other resources like:
- Your site analytics (data on how many people visit)
- Competitor sites’ landing pages
Look at your competitors
Stakeholders should be aware of the competition’s strategy, since it will give you a good idea of how to approach your own SEO.
- Understand what keywords they’re targeting, as well as their link profile (i.e., who links to them). These two pieces of information can help you identify what type of content needs to be created and where it should be placed.
Once you’ve done this, it’s time to implement your own SEO strategy. Start by creating a list of keywords and phrases that are relevant to your business. Include both long-tail and short-tail terms (i.e., “shoe store near me” versus “shoes”).
Crawl your site
Now that you have a better understanding of the SEO process and how it works, it’s time to crawl your site!
Crawling your site is something that needs to be done regularly. It tells you how well your on-page optimisation is working. If you don’t crawl regularly, then you’re not going to know if anything has changed with regards to your rankings or organic traffic.
There are lots of tools out there that can help with this step, but one I’ve found useful in my own work is Screaming Frog (https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk). It’s a desktop application that allows you to crawl through all parts of your website including images and videos as well as HTML pages and downloadable files like PDFs or Word documents.
Create great content
One of the best things you can do to improve your search engine rankings is to create great content.
The most obvious advantage of having lots of high-quality content is that it’s an effective way to keep visitors on your site for longer, which will lead to more engagement with your brand and a higher conversion rate.
But there are other benefits too:
A strong content marketing strategy can also help you to attract links from other websites and social media platforms, which helps search engines like Google understand that your site is an authority on a particular subject.
Use anchor text appropriately
When you’re writing a post, it can be tempting to use all kinds of keywords in your anchor text. But don’t do that! You’ll have better results if you use anchor text that’s natural, appropriate, and useful for your readers.
For example, let’s say you’re writing an article about SEO. You might want to use the phrase “SEO” as your anchor text because people are likely searching for it on Google or Bing (although maybe not so much now that everyone knows what SEO stands for). Or perhaps someone is looking for information about how their website could be more search engine friendly—you might want to write something like this:
- Search engine friendly websites help Google find them faster.*
That way when someone searches “search engine friendly websites,” they’ll find your article.
While this strategy works well in theory, sometimes it doesn’t work out so well in practice; remember how we talked earlier about keyword stuffing? And even though there are ways around keyword stuffing (such as using synonyms), sometimes even those tactics aren’t enough! The truth is that most people who visit your site won’t even notice what keywords appear in the anchor text unless they look closely—and if no one looks closely at my blog posts then why am I bothering with this whole SEO thing anyway?!
Link to your site from local directories and other relevant websites.
In order to give your website better rankings on search engines, you need to link to it from other websites. Linking can be done in two ways:
- A backlink is when another website links back to your site by including its URL in the code of the page or posting a hyperlink on its homepage or elsewhere in the site.
- A reciprocal link is when two sites exchange links so that each benefits from increased traffic between the two sites.
Search engine optimisation for dummies seo
Search engine optimisation, or SEO for short, is the process of improving a website’s visibility in search engines.
As you may have guessed by the name “search engine optimisation”, SEO is all about getting your site ranked higher on Google and other search engines. If you want more people to visit your website and buy from it (or download content from it), then doing some basic SEO work should be on the top of your list.
If you’re unsure about how well-optimised your website currently is, there are plenty of free tools available that will analyse its performance for you. For example:
- Google Analytics will show you how many visitors come to your site each month and where they came from;
- Alexa Internet tracks which sites link to yours;
- Open Site Explorer measures how high up in Google’s results pages other websites rank when users search for terms relevant to yours – but beware: not all links are created equal!
Conclusion
We hope you enjoyed reading this guide and learned some new things. If there is anything you’re still not sure about, please contact us at our office or through email. We will be happy to help with any queries you may have!