SEO is known as Search Engine Optimisation. It can be a minefield and a bit of a nightmare trying to understand and get your head around what it’s all about. Believe me I’m still clueless with the majority of it.
There is quite a lot of information on the internet and in books about SEO, but again these are not always the easiest to understand. For those interested in SEO and how it can benefit their business and online presence, you may want to consider a useful digital marketing course which is taking place in London this month.
So what is SEO all about?
In a nutshell SEO is the activity which improves search engine rankings. When you type a search term into Google, it will bring up links to pages which it considers relevant to the chosen search. For example I type in chocolate and the Wikipedia article is at the top followed by chocolate sellers around the UK. However it’s not just about the relevancy of the website but also about authority and this is where it gets slightly confusing.
Authority – This is measured by analysing the number of quality links and number of links from other websites.
Why is SEO so important for businesses?
Remember the days pre-internet of going into a book shop or a library? And being unsure of which book you needed? Say you was wanting books on a certain hobby. You’d ask the shop keeper/librarian for help. They would then ask you more about your search to narrow it down a little. Then search through catalogues to give you the best ranking books at that time. Well that’s sort of how SEO works – The best links/articles get placed at the top of a google search and lets face it! Who doesn’t want to be at the top of the search or at least on the top page? That’s why SEO is so important. If your business is internet based or simply has an internet presence then you will be wanting potential customers/clients to easily find you.
How to improve your SEO
As website owners it’s down to you to create authority pages. These pages need to contain content that people find useful and will share on other relevant high ranking websites such as blogs and social media. Google will pick up on shares and authority signals. (tho please don’t ask me how or to explain this as it’s down to complex algorithms that I know nothing about) Basically it’s all about writing great content which contains words and phrases that people are likely to search for and making your content easy to link to and share. It can take time to get a higher ranking so it’s important to keep at it.
How to get links
Again it can take time to get links to your website from other high ranking sites. It’s about quality over quantity. A webpage with a few hundred words of quality content will do much better than say a thousand words of poorly written words. However google does give more credit to longer articles so again it can be very confusing. It won’t happen overnight but writing great content will secure those links. Remember good high ranking sites won’t link to poor content.
Domain authority & Page authority – If you have a website then it’s very likely that you have at some point been asked for your Domain authority or your DA for short.
Domain authority – This is how trusted and influential your website is and gives each site an individual score from 0-100. The top ranking sites include Facebook and other social networking platforms.
Page authority – Is similar to DA but focuses more on the topics covered on particular pages.
Domain authority is especially relevant and important for bloggers like myself when working with particular brands.
I hope this information has helped a little and if you live in or near London or can easily get there then please consider the course I mentioned above.
