Clients have often asked for some clarity around what is SEO and why is it important to my website? As a business owner of website you need to at least understand the fundamentals of SEO even if it is just to ensure that you have an idea of both what you are paying an expert to do as well as being able to check to some degree the effectiveness of SEO on your website.
SEO is an acronym for Search Engine Optimisation and quite simply it is about ensuring that various elements on each page of your website an links to your website from other websites do their job in telling a search engine what your website is about as well as what any particular page is about.SEO is broken down into two primary components; On-Page Optimisation (stuff that happens directly on your website) and Off-Page Optimisation (stuff that happens outside of your website but affects your website such as links to a page within your site). This article is dealing with the On-Page factors.
Search engines such as Google have a business model and that is to provide a customer (someone searching Google) with most relevant website relative to what they keyword they have typed into the search bar. The relevance has to take in several factors; the most obvious being direct relevance from the keyword to the content of the top most ranked website but there are also factors such as "is the query potentially a retail based search or an information based search"or "what are the geographical limitations of the search request". For example if I typed into Google Ray ban information I get one set of results whereas if I type in Ray ban sunglasses I get a distinctly different set of results.
When looking at doing SEO for your business website this is something you need to take into account. Could potential customers searching for my product be looking for information first or are they more likely to be direct to retail customers. Will there be emphasis on my geographical location and should I include that in my keywords.
SEO starts off with some strategic decisions around factors such as what is my goal when a visitor hits my site, who is my target market, how do they purchase, will they research my product/service first, do I want to target specific locations. Questions like this will ten lead you into understanding what keywords are going to be researched to drive traffic to your website and achieve the goals set out for your online business model.
This is where the physical aspect of SEO starts or what we call "On Page Optimisation" so called because we are going to take each individual page and ensure that both the visible and invisible elements are optimised correctly to ensure that we providing a clear message to search engines on what our site is all about.
Note: Without doing SEO search engines will still rank you but the difference is that they will rank you on what they interpret your site to be about. Depending on how you have organically laid out your site and the text you have used Google will make assumptions based on what it finds in the Titles and text and may get it wrong.
On Page Optimisation starts with keyword analysis to decide what keywords relevant to your business, product or service are most commonly used by people searching online. For example if you have a service called telescheduling which is your cleverly branded version of telemarketing you may well rank number 1 in Google for it but after doing some keyword research you may also find that there have been no search requests in the last 12 months for that term simply because it is not a common term that people would use when looking for outbound call centres.
Armed with a good set of keywords the On-Page Optimisation process continues with looking at both the visible (stuff visitors & Google see) and the invisible (stuff Google sees) elements and ensuring that they are well crafted into page titles, headings and descriptions. I say well crafted because we need to understand that not only are we telling search engines what our site is about but we are also selling a click to our site to real people. If our title (the blue text in a Google Search Result is something like "RayBan, Ray-ban sunglasses, Sunglasses, Buy Sunglasses" it is not really as compelling a title to a potential customer as "Designer Glasses - Discounts available on Ray Ban Sunglasses".
This is a time consuming process as there are an absolute bare minimum of six factors being; titles, descriptions, heading, content, alt tags and internal links and this is for each page. There are some automated software programs available and my only advice there is to stay away from them There is no alternative to the human creation of well crafted elements on your website. Remember, Google wants you to be naturally good not artificially ok.
We have a motto in the office "Analyse, Review and Implement" then rinse and repeat. What this means is that before going all gang busters on SEO strategies you need to first analyse your site and review its current effectiveness in search engines, what elements are missing from pages within your site and what is already ok. Only then will you have a clear understanding of what and where to implement. Once you have been through the On-Page SEO process (this may be in a months time) you need to analyse again and review those factors to see if there is anything else which needs implementing.
On-Page factors are absolutely crucial to setting the foundation to be searchable in Google but even though they are both a critical element and can be very time consuming they only represent approx 25% of the SEO value in how Google ranks your site in importance (According to Hubspot Inbound Marketing Professionals) the other 75% is inbound links to your website from other websites.
In Summary SEO is the critical foundation towards being indexed relevantly by search engines. Other marketing efforts will help drive the On-Page SEO effectiveness through the organic building of relevant inbound links from other websites, blogs, social media, article sites and directories.
Russell Masters
trainer at websitefuel
mobile | 021 332 404
office | 07 9811 037
emailme | russell@teamspark.co.nz
visitme | www.websitefuel.co.nz
SEO is an acronym for Search Engine Optimisation and quite simply it is about ensuring that various elements on each page of your website an links to your website from other websites do their job in telling a search engine what your website is about as well as what any particular page is about.SEO is broken down into two primary components; On-Page Optimisation (stuff that happens directly on your website) and Off-Page Optimisation (stuff that happens outside of your website but affects your website such as links to a page within your site). This article is dealing with the On-Page factors.
Search engines such as Google have a business model and that is to provide a customer (someone searching Google) with most relevant website relative to what they keyword they have typed into the search bar. The relevance has to take in several factors; the most obvious being direct relevance from the keyword to the content of the top most ranked website but there are also factors such as "is the query potentially a retail based search or an information based search"or "what are the geographical limitations of the search request". For example if I typed into Google Ray ban information I get one set of results whereas if I type in Ray ban sunglasses I get a distinctly different set of results.
When looking at doing SEO for your business website this is something you need to take into account. Could potential customers searching for my product be looking for information first or are they more likely to be direct to retail customers. Will there be emphasis on my geographical location and should I include that in my keywords.
SEO starts off with some strategic decisions around factors such as what is my goal when a visitor hits my site, who is my target market, how do they purchase, will they research my product/service first, do I want to target specific locations. Questions like this will ten lead you into understanding what keywords are going to be researched to drive traffic to your website and achieve the goals set out for your online business model.
This is where the physical aspect of SEO starts or what we call "On Page Optimisation" so called because we are going to take each individual page and ensure that both the visible and invisible elements are optimised correctly to ensure that we providing a clear message to search engines on what our site is all about.
Note: Without doing SEO search engines will still rank you but the difference is that they will rank you on what they interpret your site to be about. Depending on how you have organically laid out your site and the text you have used Google will make assumptions based on what it finds in the Titles and text and may get it wrong.
On Page Optimisation starts with keyword analysis to decide what keywords relevant to your business, product or service are most commonly used by people searching online. For example if you have a service called telescheduling which is your cleverly branded version of telemarketing you may well rank number 1 in Google for it but after doing some keyword research you may also find that there have been no search requests in the last 12 months for that term simply because it is not a common term that people would use when looking for outbound call centres.
Armed with a good set of keywords the On-Page Optimisation process continues with looking at both the visible (stuff visitors & Google see) and the invisible (stuff Google sees) elements and ensuring that they are well crafted into page titles, headings and descriptions. I say well crafted because we need to understand that not only are we telling search engines what our site is about but we are also selling a click to our site to real people. If our title (the blue text in a Google Search Result is something like "RayBan, Ray-ban sunglasses, Sunglasses, Buy Sunglasses" it is not really as compelling a title to a potential customer as "Designer Glasses - Discounts available on Ray Ban Sunglasses".
This is a time consuming process as there are an absolute bare minimum of six factors being; titles, descriptions, heading, content, alt tags and internal links and this is for each page. There are some automated software programs available and my only advice there is to stay away from them There is no alternative to the human creation of well crafted elements on your website. Remember, Google wants you to be naturally good not artificially ok.
We have a motto in the office "Analyse, Review and Implement" then rinse and repeat. What this means is that before going all gang busters on SEO strategies you need to first analyse your site and review its current effectiveness in search engines, what elements are missing from pages within your site and what is already ok. Only then will you have a clear understanding of what and where to implement. Once you have been through the On-Page SEO process (this may be in a months time) you need to analyse again and review those factors to see if there is anything else which needs implementing.
On-Page factors are absolutely crucial to setting the foundation to be searchable in Google but even though they are both a critical element and can be very time consuming they only represent approx 25% of the SEO value in how Google ranks your site in importance (According to Hubspot Inbound Marketing Professionals) the other 75% is inbound links to your website from other websites.
In Summary SEO is the critical foundation towards being indexed relevantly by search engines. Other marketing efforts will help drive the On-Page SEO effectiveness through the organic building of relevant inbound links from other websites, blogs, social media, article sites and directories.
Russell Masters
trainer at websitefuel
mobile | 021 332 404
office | 07 9811 037
emailme | russell@teamspark.co.nz
visitme | www.websitefuel.co.nz
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