What is SEO?

Do you have a website for your business? Is hardly anyone visiting your page? Are you not selling many products online?

If the online branch of your business is not performing well, you must consider SEO. SEO stands for search engine optimisation. It sounds complicated but, but the concept is in fact quite simple. It is used to raise your search engine ranking. Let me explain…

With more and more people choosing to shop online every day, developing a stand-out online presence is an essential part of operating a successful business. Having a website for your business in today’s society is practically a necessity. But what good is a website that no one goes to?

When people put a search query into a search engine such as google, you ideally want your site link to surface on the first results page. Most people only ever look at the first couple of pages, so if your site isn’t visible until somewhere past this point, the harsh reality is most people are never going to visit your site.

Just think of the internet as a global rat race. Everyone is fighting to have their website seen first. The higher your search engine ranking, the closer you are to top spot and the higher the chances more people will visit your site (higher traffic). The more traffic you get; the more products you sell. So if you’re sick of losing the race and feel like winning for a change,
SEO is the very first thing you should consider. I cannot express the importance of SEO.

How do I use SEO to improve my search engine ranking?

So all this is well and good, but more importantly, how exactly do you use SEO to improve your search engine ranking and help benefit your business? And what should you avoid? Well, there are many professional services on offer, but first you should consider some of the simple tips below. You can easily apply them yourself and overtime you can conduct test searches to see how your ranking has improved. Depending on the nature of your product and how many competitors you have, it may not even be necessary to hire someone to do it for you.

Do's

• Update website content regularly 
• Have a FAQs page
• Use keywords and phrases (pick ones that people are most likely to use when searching for you)
• Make content relevant
• Optimise images for fast loading time (i.e. use tinypng.com)
• Include a links page

Don'ts

• Copy and paste text from other sources (plagiarism)
• Have pages with no content
• Use hidden text
• Duplicate content
• Use keyword stuffing (cramming the page with keywords i.e. invisible text)

SEO is not the same as SEM

Search engine marketing, or SEM is similar to SEO, but instead of fighting for first place you pay for it. You have probably seen those Ad's at the top of every search results page (yellow highlight in image below). They come before the organic section (blue highlight in image below). Each time somebody visits the page a payment is made to the service provider, for example google Adwords. Sometimes a combination of SEO and SEM can be very useful for a business.

Stay tuned for our next blog to learn more about SEM! - Click Here

Written by
John Blythman