A Short Primer on SEO

Online business owners are the people who know what SEO means and whose sites (and products) are most affected by it. Most internet users are not very familiar with it and actually are the least affected by it.

SEO (search engine optimization) is simply the whole process of optimizing web pages and their content in order to be easily discovered by users searching for terms (keywords) relevant to your website.

SEO as a term also describes the process of making web pages easier for search engine indexing software (called “crawlers”) to find, scan and index your site. 

The process

Questions about the SEO Brisbane range from how does a site (or your company’s site) gets optimized for the search engines all the way to the information  regarding how much time to spend on SEO. Other questions come up like seeing the difference in good SEO advice from the bad or harmful ones. In search engine optimization, however, the most important aspect is how to leverage SEO and help drive more traffic, leads, and sales for your business.

Searches

There are billions of searches daily and this means there is an immense amount of specific, high-intent traffic. People are searching things directly related to your business. A search query like “I want to buy car” displays clear commercial intent. They represent more opportunities to connect with those folks in the site and help answer their questions, solve their problems, and become a trusted resource for them.

Search engines

Google dominates the field of search engines that include Yahoo, Bing and many others.  It has the majority of the search engine traffic in the world, with some variations from industry to industry. The Google algorithm is very complex but it is only looking for pages that contain high-quality and relevant information to the user’s query. This algorithm does the relevance by way of crawling (reading) you web’s content and evaluating if it is relevant (“ranking signals”)

Algorithm 

Google’s algorithm determines relevance by “crawling” (or reading) your website’s content and evaluating (algorithmically) whether that content is relevant to what the searcher is looking for. This is based on the keywords it contains and other factors (known as “ranking signals”).

Google also determines “quality” through a number of means, but a site’s links and their profiles is also very important. Google also considers a site’s loading speed and “mobile friendliness”. Lastly, there is also the factor of how much unique content a site has (versus “thin” or duplicated, low-value content). Google is looking for pages that contain high-quality and fresh information relevant to the searcher’s query.

Keyword research / targeting best practices

Knowing what you are optimizing for is the first step in search engine optimization. It consists of identifying terms (called “keywords”) that people are searching for. This is what you want your site to rand for in search engines like Google. There are many key factors to take into account when determining the keywords you want to target on your site.

Search volume

For a site owner, the first important factor to take into account is how many people are actually searching for a given keyword. 

The more people there are searching for the keyword, the bigger potential audience your site can reach.

Relevance

 Not all searches can be productive for a site, especially in the aspect of relevance. This simply means that a term may be frequently search for. However, it does not necessarily mean that it is relevant to your prospects.

Keyword relevance is the connection between the content of your site and the user’s search query. This is a critical ranking signal. You may have searches but it will not mean a thing if it does not relate to whatever your site is providing.

Competition 

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The keywords which have a higher search volume can drive significant amounts of traffic for a site. However, the competition for the premium positioning in the search engines results pages can be intense.

There is a need here of knowing your prospective customers and the item that are likely to search for. You need to understand what types of things they are interested in, what their problems are, what tools they use and who else they are buying things from. 

On-page optimization

Once you have your keywords list, you can actually implement your targeted keywords into your site’s contents. Every page of your site should be targeting a core term. There are other on-page elements that must also be considered alongside your keyword list and other related terms. The following are part of the optimization work.

Title tags

The single most impactful place you can put your keyword is in the title tag of page. The title tag is not your page’s primary headline. The headline on the page is typically an H1 HTRML element. The title tag is what you can see at the very top of your browser, and is populated by your page’s source code in a Meta tag. Make your title tag match with your organic results machine.

Meta descriptions

The Meta description (another Meta HTML element that isn’t seen on your actual page) is effectively your site’s additional ad copy. Google has its own standards that your Meta description does not always show. However, if you have a compelling description of your page enticing user to click it, you can great increase your site’s traffic. (Showing up in search results does not guarantee traffic. There is still need to get the searches to come to your site.)

Content 

The actual content of your page is very important. These pages will have different functions. The cornerstone content asset you want others to link to needs to be very different than the support content asset for your users to find and get answers from. There is no required number of words and if you have a few pages of content with about a handful to a couple of hundred words, Google would not mind. 

It is frowned upon by Google if you have a large number (think thousands) of extremely short (50-200 words of content) pages or perhaps lots of duplicated content where nothing changes but the page’s title tag and probably a line of text. 

It would appear to Google that you’re trying to flood their index with lots of low value pages in an attempt to have them rank. However, if you have a compelling description of your page that would make folks searching likely to click, you can greatly increase traffic.

Engagement 

Google is increasingly rating the engagement and the user experience metrics more heavily. You can add impact to your site by making sure your content answers the questions searchers are asking. 

These questions could be likely to make them stay on your page and engage with your content so that they’re likely to stay on your page and engage with your content.