SEO or Search Engine Optimisation
What is SEO?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation and refers to the practice of increasing a website’s visibility thus the quantity and quality of traffic (clicks) to your business webpages through organic search engine results (non-paid top results). In short, it’s a combination of techniques and disciplines with the focus to make your website appear on top search results.
What does SEO really involve?
There are 3 key objectives and components that go into Search Engine Optimisation: quality of traffic, quantity and organic results. Let’s look into them individually.
Quality of traffic: you want to make sure that people finding and clicking on your website are the ones genuinely interested in the products and services you offer. The content on your website plays a big part here.
Quantity of traffic: with the right audience seeing your SERPs (search engine result pages) and clicking through, the last piece is acquiring more traffic.
Organic results. All the results are non-paid (top four in Google).
How does SEO work?
Every time you searched on Google, Bing or Yahoo, have you ever thought about how they magically show you great relevant results for your search query in fractions of a second? Here's how it works. Google, for example, has a crawler (computer software) that goes out and collects information about all the websites they can find on the Internet and build a very detailed index. That magical database or index is then processed by an algorithm (Google’s secret sauce) that tries to match all that data with your specific search query. There are a lot of variables that go into Google’s algorithm (set of rules) from website content, website structure, website technology, domain name and more. The optimisation part in SEO is where an expert or set team looks into all these variables and sets out a plan to write and structure content in a way that search engines are able to identify and “read” adequately but also the users. From keywords on a text to title tags, meta descriptions, internal links and more.