A Brief Guide to Understanding SEO

Search Engine Optimisation or SEO is one of the most critical components of a business’s digital marketing presence. It involves techniques and strategies that help you optimise your ranking on a search engine such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo. 

In simple terms, SEO is all about the race to be at the top of the search engine rankings. The higher you rank on the top page, the higher the likelihood your target audience finds out about your business or website when searching for a particular product or service. 

Want to learn what is SEO and how you can improve search rankings for your website? But before we jump into the techniques that will help you get a higher website ranking, let's go over the fundamentals of SEO first. 

Why is SEO essential to achieve online success? 

SEO covers the processes, techniques, and strategies that are used to get a higher ranking on a search engine. What sets SEO apart from paid advertising is that it is focused on organic ranking. You don't have to pay to be featured on the top results. Instead, you focus on various components of your website, like creating high-quality content, creating the right indexing, and making your website user-friendly, mobile-friendly, and easy to navigate.  

Getting a higher website ranking is crucial for your business or website as: 

• The number one organic result on a search engine gets 33% of search traffic compared to the 18% of the next result. The remainder of the results have lower search traffic compared to the ones that precede them. 

• SEO also helps you market your physical stores or business, as 72% of searches visit a local store or company premises within 24 hours of the search.

What are the key components of SEO? 

Search engines work like libraries, wherein all the information on the web gets copied into their database. When a user types a query in the search engine, it looks through all these pages and their indexes, helping you find the relevant information using a search engine algorithm. 

This algorithm, or a computer program, is programmed to look for relevant keywords, the usability of pages, expertise of sources, location, and other parameters to help users find the most accurate information. 

SEO is the process of ensuring that your website is easy to navigate and crawl for this algorithm and that you get featured in the top searches when users are looking for keywords similar to your offerings. 

Since it is much deeper than just keyword optimisation or some back-end website hacks, for simplicity, SEO can be designated into three buckets:

Technical SEO 

Technical SEO implies all the aspects that ensure that search engines can crawl and index your website pages and content without any issues. 

It includes page indexing, XML sitemaps, website structure and navigation, removing duplicate content, and other related activities. 

On-page SEO 

On-Page SEO focuses on every aspect of your website that will be showcased to the end user. 

In this part, you focus on aspects that will be visible to your visitors, such as website images, links, alt-txt, headings, content, and more. 

Off-page SEO  

Crawlers or search engines don't see things the way humans do. 

So, off-page SEO focuses on making the back-end or off-page aspects of the website, like backlink building, encouraging branded content, increasing website engagement, interlinking, managing inbound and outbound links, etc.    

What are the key factors that impact your SEO score? 

Now that we've understood what SEO is and how search engines operate, let's look at the factors that impact website SEO, particularly Google’s SEO ranking. 

Since its first algorithm update in 2006, Google has over 200 known ranking factors, which keep changing as newer updates are launched. However, the cornerstone of all the updates always remains the same. These factors are:

Website crawlability 

Crawability refers to how well your content is indexed and linked to ensure that its computer program, called the spider, can discover all pages. 

To ensure this is extremely simple and fast, websites need to be optimised by checking there are no duplicate pages, there is proper internal linking, and appropriate tags like Nofollow tag or robots.txt are used, which tells the spider where to go and where not to go.  

Mobile friendliness 

Mobile devices accounted for 63% of all organic searches in 2021, and the numbers are only going up. Given the statistic, it is no surprise that Google ranks websites based on mobile-friendliness as a key factor. 

To check for a website’s mobile friendliness, website owners need to make sure that the look and feel of the page, its navigation, and other aspects are optimised for mobile users. This can also be done easily using Google’s mobile-friendly testing tool. 

Page speed 

Page speed refers to how fast your website loads. This is crucial not just for SEO aspects but also because users today are more likely to go to a competitor's page if your website doesn’t load in the first few seconds. 

Website page speed can be checked easily using Google’s PageSpeed Insights, which also provides you with the optimisations required to improve page speed.  

Keyword search intent 

When it comes to keywords, there is an entire world to discover, be it long-tail keywords, short-tail keywords, or search intent. Keyword search intent is the algorithm’s understanding of the motive behind a search query. 

For example, someone searching Big Data and Big Data Company get different search results, even if the two terms are very similar. The reason? While most searches on Big Data are focused on understanding the technology, it is the more targeted Big Data Company that has users actually looking for Big Data companies and providers.  

Backlinks 

Backlinks are essentially links from credible sources or websites with a high domain authority that are referring back to your website. 

Since this greatly impacts the overall SEO score, generating quality backlinks is a crucial part of any SEO strategy. It could include steps like writing guest posts, being featured in industry journals and reports, publishing research, creating helpful content like eBooks, guides, blogs, etc.  

Content quality and expertise 

There's a saying that a website with good content doesn’t really need SEO to rank at the top. However, a website with good content and the best SEO practices can definitely make an unbeatable combination. 

Google uses the E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) principles to determine the quality of your content. This depends not just on how the algorithm sees your content but also on your reader, as the time spent on your website, the pages they engage with, the freshness of your content, and the value it adds all impact your overall ranking. 

Simplify your SEO efforts today 

Knowing how search engines work and how you can effectively improve search rankings for your website is crucial, especially if you want to generate leads online. While SEO might feel like a small lever in the value chain of digital marketing, it is much more than that and converges on other aspects. 

SEO is more than just a few tweaks—it requires continuous updates, high-quality content, keyword optimisation, building reputable backlinking, and more. 

Instead of trying to hack the SEO game, it's always recommended to make it a continuous process in your overall digital marketing approach. This will help you not just make it to the top of the search rankings, but also stay there when the algorithms get updated. 

Thus, you need Vodien’s SEO solutions to leverage it for the long term to boost your visibility, popularity, and sales. Contact our team today to get you started!