SEO is a term that’s often thrown around in online communities, but do you really know what it is? SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation and helps bloggers and businesses boost their website up the ranks of Google search results. This blog will explain just how SEO works and how you can utilise effective website SEO to increase traffic to your site.
Effective Website SEO: How Does SEO Work?
To understand SEO, you need to first understand how search engines work. Search engines like Google don’t just randomly rank websites in whatever order it feels like – it ranks them in order of importance. But who decides which sites are important, and which ones aren’t? It isn’t a guy sitting behind a desk making these choices, it is Google’s built-in algorithm which learns about your website and determines where to put it in the search results list.
What are the criteria? Simply put, an algorithm learns based on the data it is given. The more data your website feeds to the algorithm, the more easily it can understand why and how your website is important. If you don’t give it much information, it can’t categorise your website, and therefore, can’t place you in very many search results.
What Does SEO Involve?
To implement SEO, you can use a number of different tools. Here are a few of the basic SEO tools and how they help your site:
- Keywords.
Algorithms learn with simple data. For SEO purposes, including lots of keywords relating to your product, business, location and services help the algorithm to assign more meaning to your website – and subsequently list it more highly. Keyword research is essential to get going with SEO.
- Backlinks.
What are backlinks? Backlinks are used usually by bloggers, in order to connect their posts or to posts from other sites. For example, if you write a blog about arts and crafts, within that blog you can put an anchor text, with a link back to another blog you wrote about a similar subject. You can also link to other websites or brands that you mention in the blog. This helps by increasing clicks on your site and associating your website with another popular website which ranks highly.
How To Get Started With Effective Website SEO
If this all sounds like music to your ears, there are many ways to get involved with SEO. Firstly, it is a good idea to contact an SEO agency who can provide expert guidance, and a much more cost-effective strategy than paid advertisers. Secondly, use free tutorials and articles online to help you get started with your SEO strategy.
Thirdly, you could reach out to other bloggers in your community and discuss how they effectively implement SEO. You could then start a blog if you don’t already have one, and use this to implement the new techniques you have learned and increase footfall on your site!
Effective Website SEO – In Conclusion
This is a very basic starting point for those wanting to employ effective website SEO. Make sure that you at the very least start with these points but then research more in order to boost your online visibility.