What is SEO?

Well, it’s Search Engine Optimisation of course… or in less techy terms, it’s simply a set of rules to make sure your website ticks all the boxes for Search Engines which will help you rank closer to the top in the search results.

One of the aims of the rules is to increase the quality of your website by making it more user-friendly by being faster and easy to navigate.

What does SEO mean for your website or blog?

The biggest benefit of ticking all those boxes is, of course, having that number 1 spot on the search results, or at least you want to be seen on the first page. The majority of internet users are more likely to click on one of the top five results. The further down the list you are, the less relevant you are seen to be.

Of course, as we’ve already talked about, SEO is about increasing the quality of your website and making it more user-friendly. The more accessible your website, the more time users are likely to spend on it and keep coming back. It’s all about user experience. Think of your website as a shop. Your customers want to walk in, have an amazing welcome, to be able to walk around the aisles and find what they need with information clearly displayed so they know what they’re buying and then for a quick and easy process at the checkout.

A fully optimised website or blog also puts you ahead of the competition. Users trust Search Engines. So if a Search Engine is recommending one website over another, guess who is more likely to get that custom. And the great thing is, the trust that is so important between a business and its customer is already there because that Search Engine has already installed that trust by ranking them so highly.

SEO works in a framework of three main stages.

• Technical SEO. This allows Search Engines to crawl and index your website without any issues. This is about making sure the settings for your website are correct to make indexing and crawling easier.
• On-Page SEO. This is mainly to do with the content and elements on a page such as header codes, title optimisation and internal links which all allow the Search Engines to understand the meaning and context of your page.
• Off-Page SEO. This refers to things outside of your website. One of the most obvious being backlinks. Backlinks are a sign of trust, particularly if it is coming from well known and trusted sites. However, be aware of where backlinks are coming from. Good content which produces natural backlinks are clearly favoured by Search Engines while other backlinks can actually be a violation of Search Engine guidelines and will have the opposite effect and actually count against you.

The most important thing to remember is that your website needs to have good and relevant content, and the best way to do that is to put yourself in the position of your customers. A website with great content can still do well without SEO.

If you want help with your website or SEO contact Emma at emma@theumbrellatree.co.uk or call on 07977 640119.