SEO stands for search engine optimization.
This is the process of making your website more attractive to users and search engines.
You optimize your website for search engines so they can find it and understand it. If your website passes the search engine’s tests, it will add your website to its search results.
Once your website is listed in the search results, anyone who searches online can find your website, and visit it.
That’s SEO in a nutshell.
How does SEO work?
First, you build a great website. Then you need to tell the search engines (like Google) about it.
Google has software (called an algorithm) that crawls your website, The algorithm checks the quality of your site structure, your content, and many other factors.
If your site passes Google’s tests, it will hopefully show it to searchers when they search for things that are related to your website.
Once you’re in the search results, people can see your website and click the link to visit it. Now you have site visitors!
The longer these visitors stay on your website (by reading or clicking pages) the more search engines will learn that your website offers great content, and the higher your rankings will climb.
How does Google test my website?
Let’s use Google as an example search engine, since it’s the most popular.
Google wants to show great content to the people who search on it so that they will keep using Google as their search tool.
Therefore, Google is constantly thinking up new ways to decide if websites are good enough to show to users.
The golden rule of Google is that it wants the best search experience for its users.
Google wants users to get fast, accurate results to their questions, every time they search. They have created a simple outline for website owners to follow, to ensure they create content that the Google searcher (and therefore Google itself) loves.
What type of content does Google want to rank?
Google uses the acronym E-E-A-T to score content on websites.
The E-E-A-T score will determine the quality of the content. This way, Google tries its best to ensure that the websites they rank in their search results provide accurate, reliable, and trustworthy content.
What does E-E-A-T stand for?
E-E-A-T stands for:
- Expertise
- Experience
- Authoritativeness
- Trustworthiness
E-E-A-T is centered around trust. It aims to ensure content is unique and beneficial for searchers.
So, if you want to optimize your website for search engines (and especially Google), it’s critical that you improve the ‘E-E-A-T score’ of your website content.
You can do this by creating content that:
- Is original
- Is helpful
- Is not duplicated from somewhere else
- Includes relevant and high-quality images and videos to enhance your visitor’s experience
- Includes a personal touch by including your own experience and insights
- Is written by experts in your field
- Is authoritative and trustworthy
It’s a daunting list!
However, it follows one, simple rule – the user experience is always the most important thing you should be worrying about!
How do I create a great user experience?
Creating a great user experience is the backbone of SEO, and the entire focus of search engine optimization.
The user experience includes every element of your website, including:
- Is your content interesting, engaging, and of great quality?
- Is your content original and helpful?
- Are you trustworthy?
- Are you an authority on the topic?
- Does your content include a personal touch?
But user experience incorporates many more factors than just content…
What else impacts a user’s experience on my website?
Every element of your website will impact your user’s experience of your site but here are some key areas to look at and optimize:
- Website speed (Is your website fast enough?)
- Website structure (Users should be able to access any page within THREE clicks.)
- Mobile responsiveness (Does your site look great on all devices?)
- Is your content easy to read?
- Is it easy for users to find information?
- Are there more resources for users to look through, or other things they can do on your site?
Each of these factors must be examined on its own, and optimized as best you can.
There are loads of SEO tools out there but sometimes they can lead you to over-optimize your website, which isn’t useful either because it looks like you’re trying ‘too hard’ and Google doesn’t like that either. Sigh. SEO isn’t so easy…
SEO must always look natural. Whatever optimizing you do, it must always aim to give your user the BEST experience possible.
Whether you want them to be able to find your products easily, or learn from your blog, or watch your videos on their phones late at night, you must build a website that gives your user exactly what they want. Those are the sites that get traction on search engines.
So far, this has been a general overview of how SEO works, but I think we can explain it in a little more detail, so you can start to work on your website today.
How does SEO work – this time in more detail:
Let’s say your website sells homes and real estate.
You might want to rank for ‘buy house’ or ‘rent flat’. If you rank highly for those terms, this means lots of searchers will see your website link and hopefully click on it. When they’re on your website, you can guide them to the pages where they can see the properties you have for sale.
SEO aims to match your website to the searcher’s search term on Google. You are trying to answer the ‘search intent’ of their keyword with your website.
Example: They search for ‘buy house’ and your website shows them houses to buy.
Seems simple enough, right?
Theoretically it is, but it’s not that easy to put into practice.
How to start optimizing your website for search engines TODAY
There are LOTS of ways to optimize your website and some pretty significant DOs and DON’Ts.
But you need to start somewhere. If you’ve never done any SEO, here are five things you can do TODAY to get the SEO ball rolling on your own website.
1. Setup and Install Google Analytics and Google Search Console
Make sure your website has these two services from Google setup and working. They are free and they both offer a massive wealth of information. You might not know what you’re going to use them for just yet, but your site MUST be tracking and gathering data on your website as soon as possible. If you can’t track your website traffic and user activities, you’ll never know if your SEO efforts are achieving anything.
2. Install the plugin ‘Redirection’ (for WordPress websites)
You can find it here: https://wordpress.org/plugins/redirection/
This plugin automatically generates a ‘redirect’ if you change a page URL.
If you change a URL on your website to better optimize it, you won’t lose any traffic to the old URL.
Example: If your real estate website menu is www.yourdomain.com/services but you want to change it to www.yourdomain.com/buy-house (because this describes your service far better) you will need to create a redirect from the old URL to the new URL. You do this so if anyone tries to visit the old URL, they will be automatically redirected to the new URL. If you don’t create a redirect and you change a URL, and then someone visits the old URL, they will see a broken link or 404 error page. This is a bad user experience, and the last thing you want is a bad user experience on your website!
You will only see the benefits of this plugin when you have decided on a great website structure and start to rearrange your site. But if you don’t have this installed and aren’t aware of the importance of redirects, you will have damaged your SEO before you even get going.
3. Check your website speed
You can use GTMetrix to check your website speed, and it will give you a grade when it has finished testing. If you see anything other than As, you know you will need to do something about your website speed as soon as possible (pardon the pun!).
4. Check what your website looks like on your phone
Does it look good? Is it easy to use? Is the text large enough to read and are the buttons big enough? Can you see everything, or is the screen too busy or disjointed? If it’s a bit of a mess, this will need to be addressed by a web designer.
5. Decide on the target keywords for your website This is called keyword research)
Your website is about a specific topic (example: our website is about website strategy, website design, and SEO).
You must decide what the main topic of your website is, and then choose a list of supporting topics. These topics will form the basis of your list of targeted keywords. These keywords are the terms users would search for on Google, where your website would best answer their search intent and search query.
You can start small by choosing 10 keywords. As you continue with your SEO, you’ll see that businesses can target thousands of keywords, but you need to start somewhere!
This is not the end of your SEO journey…
This is only the beginning! But these five items will give you a direction in which to aim! They are your starting block.
If you have followed the steps above, you will have a decent idea of where to focus your first search engine optimization efforts.
Once you have done these five things, you can start writing your first piece of excellent content!
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