Many websites on the internet rely on search engines to attract visitors and promote any products or services that they are selling. To stand out among the competition, those who run a website can follow a process known as search engine optimisation, or SEO for short. It’s one of the key areas of any digital marketing strategy. So, what is SEO? Why is it important and how does it work? We’ll answer these questions in this short but detailed guide
We’ll also discuss useful practices which can influence your website’s SEO performance. We will also explain how our own tools here at SEO Science can help to optimise the performance of your website.
Search engine optimisation (SEO) is the process of tailoring your website and content so that it attracts natural or organic traffic through search engines. Organic traffic refers to those who find your pages and websites without clicking on any paid advertisements. Gaining more organic traffic is achieved through several of the best SEO practices that include the following:
When you create a page on your website that’s focused on a particular topic or item, you will want people to find that page when they search for that same topic or item. The better a page performs in terms of SEO, the more likely it is that it will appear among the top results when someone makes a related search query on a search engine, such as Google.
SEO strategies ultimately aim to give websites and their pages a strong organic ranking, which means that you don’t spend any money achieving that result, unlike with paid advertising. Achieving organic traffic through an SEO strategy takes time and patience, but if done right, it is a cost-effective practice that should greatly boost the popularity and reputation of your website.
How Does SEO Work?
In addition to asking what is SEO, a lot of people are keen to understand how the process actually works. In summary, SEO works by carrying out a number of actions on a website or page to make it more attractive to search engines.
Search engines use what are known as crawlers, bots or spiders to analyse websites and their pages and look for key ranking factors. These include the following:
The search engine crawlers take all of this information to help them understand what a page is about. Using the info gained from these crawlers and complex algorithms, a search engine will determine which content is the most relevant and useful for different search queries. These organic search results can include articles, images and videos plus more niche kinds of content.
One of the main appeals of organic traffic is that it is free, unlike with advertisement methods. That means you don’t have to pay every time someone clicks on your website via an organic search engine result.
Each search engine uses their own set of algorithms to help them determine how websites and pages should be ranked for different SEO keywords. The way these algorithms work are kept a secret and they are also constantly updated. However, there are certain practices which everyone with a website can follow to create a positive effect in terms of SEO performance.
Top SEO Tips For Your Website
Whether or not you already know the answer to questions such as what is SEO and how it works, you may be asking how to boost the SEO performance of your website. There are certain practices you can follow to increase optimisation in both the short and long-term future. These techniques are always worth following regardless of how big or small your website is and whatever topics, products or services it covers.
Here at SEO Science, we not only understand what is SEO but can also support your website with a search engine marketing optimisation tool that utilises the full range of effective practices for boosting organic traffic. These practices, which are always worth considering for your own website, include the following:
Keyword Research
An effective way of boosting the performance of one of your pages (and the website overall) is to include keywords related to what the page is about. The keywords will ideally be included within the content of a page in a way that feels natural and avoids stuffing them all together in a small space. Keywords can be used not only in the main part of the content, but also other areas like headings, FAQs, meta description and even things like image captions.
Certain online tools and autocomplete queries in search engines can provide insight into what keywords are worth putting within a page you’re trying to optimise. The SEO Science tool provides SEO keyword research as part of its core SEO services. To help you make more effective use of keywords, the tool can provide data on variations of your desired keyword that can be included. It can also inform you about other related search terms worth adding and highlight relevant questions people are asking which you could answer within your content. Our tool can also provide other information such as monthly search volume for particular keywords and whether they have any cost per click value.
Track Your Keyword Performance
To create and maintain strong organic traffic numbers on your pages, it’s important to regularly track where your page is ranking on search engines for different keywords. This way, you can understand if your work is having an effect and you can react quickly when a positive or negative change in performance occurs.
One of the main features of the SEO Science tool is a rank tracking function. It gives you daily updates on how the keywords in your page are performing. This is really helpful in getting you to understand whether updates you’ve made have had a positive or negative impact on your page in terms of search engine performance.
Our rank tracking feature can also support your SEO strategy. It can do so by letting you know if pages on your website have experienced a recent drop in ranking and are showing no signs of bouncing back. With this info, you can prioritise the pages that are currently struggling for performance and give them a welcome boost.
Conduct Regular Site Audits And Analysis
One of the most useful things you can do to figure out how to improve SEO performance on your website is to run a site audit. Over time, a website can develop issues which ultimately slow it down or reduce its quality in the eyes of search engine crawlers.
As part of the SEO Science tool, we can provide regular site audits and other analysis which can identify any issues that may be hampering your website’s organic search performance. We can highlight many potential issues such as broken links, issues with anchor text and any issues with images used. As well as identifying such issues, our tool can also give step-by-step guidance on how to fix these issues and point your website’s SEO strategy back in the right direction.
Get Help With Your SEO
We hope after reading this guide that you now have a better understanding of what is SEO and ways you can boost the organic search traffic on your pages. If you are looking for help in boosting the search engine optimisation on your own website, you can start using the SEO Science services today. We offer both a free package and a paid package that includes a greater range of useful SEO tools.
The free package allows you to carry out a limited amount of research which can still significantly boost the SEO performance of your website. This includes:
By choosing our paid package, you get full and unlimited access to all of the SEO Science features. These include:
If you would like to speak to us about our services, you can contact our SEO Science team online today.
What Is SEO? Learn More Here
If you would like additional information on search engine optimisation and how it works, you can check out the resources below:
You’re welcome to contact SEO Science if you would like to ask us questions about SEO or accessing our extensive range of optimisation tools.