Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

When you don’t have an audience and need to have your website and content found, search engine optimisation (SEO) can be an essential part of your marketing efforts. This is especially true if your goal is to have organic traffic.

First up, what is search engine optimisation about?

Well, simply put, the basis of optimisation is to create high quality content on your website, that search engine algorithms can easily find, catalog and serve.

How to get found?

Well, it takes work and involves a number of factors. As a first step though, you should consider what search engines use to analyse the applicability of your content to a search term.

The search term you will need to consider relates to what people are searching for and the keywords that identify them.

Once you target search terms or keywords people are actually searching for, search engines would then evaluate your content to determine if it’s a match. Once it is a match your content will be delivered.

This is where high quality content comes in.

Optimise Content

1. Research

First do some research to discover what content is being searched for.

Keyword research is a great way to zone in on topics for your content.

Topics that are too broad you will need to refine. Use the following sites to validate your topics and learn what.

• Answer the public – you can find exactly the questions people are asking based on what your content topic is about. This way you can get even more ideas for content, learn exactly what persons are searching for and actually deliver on it.
• Google trends – Google is after all the more popular search engine. Use it’s trends section to work with the data Google captures and learn about what topics are on peoples mind. Search your own topic and learn about the interest on it over time.
• Predictive search – Using Google, you can easily find additional, recommended search terms. Enter your search word or topic in the search bar and discover similar searches.

Ok, now that you’ve fine-tuned and validated your topic and gotten some insights into what people are interested in, you now do some actual keyword research.

Some tools you can use are:

• ahrefs
• semrush
• wordstream
• wordtracker

These research tools will give you details on the quantity of searches for the term, if the competition is high, cost and even other terms you can consider. These tools usually offer some free limited options for searches so you can use this to your advantage during your research.

2. Don’t forget Metadata

Ensure you enter your metadata information.

Search engines are not only checking the content on your page, they also check the meta tags for your page. Meta tags are part of the code of your website and define the metadata for your website. There are meta tags for keywords, description, author and other attributes that are used by your web browser.

It is essential to at least define the meta tag data for your title, keywords and description.

3. Generate Backlinks

Backlinks are links from another website to your website. Having these backlinks helps to set your website up as an authority with the information you share and is a great way to generate organic rankings with search engines.

Now, you want backlinks from reputable sites that are considered authorities in their own right. This authority can be passed on to you and make you also reputable with the search engines. If you can get backlinks from educational or government entities this would be super beneficial to your site as these are usually respected entities.

Getting backlinks can happen naturally if other websites find your content worthy, they can choose to link to it. You never know which content might be used as a reference on another website, so always ensure your content is high quality.

Another easy way to start creating backlinks is to write guest posts on other sites and put links back to your own. These sites should firstly offer similar content to what you are sharing or be in the same industry. Ensure they agree to allowing the backlink.

You can also look into adding links to your site from various directories. Find local directories especially for your business and be sure to add links to your website or business there.

4. Include Internal Links

We just looked at backlinks and yet another link strategy is internal links which is directly on your site. These are links you make from one page to another page on your own website.

Creating these internal links not only lets your visitors or readers discover other related content but it also gets them to stay longer on your website. Keeping visitors on your site for longer is a great way to boost your site and its rankings with the search engines.

This is one of the easiest of all these steps to implement. You simply need to refer your visitors to the other content on your site. Make it relatable to what they are currently viewing. For example if you sell products you can refer them to other similar products.

5. Analyse and Improve

The previous tips mentioned are some initial strategies you should pursue to start improving your SEO. Once you have started implementing these, your next step is to continually review and analyse if they are working. Let’s take a quick look at how.

If you have a blog website, like WordPress, it is easy to install plugins, even for free, to give you an analysis of your content. Yoast SEO is one such plugin you can use and it gives easy recommendations to help you stay on track with improving your SEO. You can also search for and install a different plugin to try other options.

If you have an e-commerce store like Prestashop, you can install Google analytics as a free option or pay for an SEO analytic tool. Google analytics does web analytics as well as SEO and has a wealth of tools you should be using for your business.

Google Analytics can also be installed for WordPress and if you use another software for your website you check for these tools availability.

Next Up

Next up? Well, I think you should check out my online courses if you need to build a website or need some website consultation. Maybe you need some extra help.

You can also check out my post on starting a blog here to get a heads start on understanding what you need to build a website.