SEO (Search Engine Optimization) – What does SEO mean and why does it matter?
It is no longer feasible or realistic to expect to be able to build a website using a free website tool (or even worse to ask a friend to help), without getting an expert to optimise the site for Google’s algorithms. A professionally built website will include SEO. The term “SEO” or “Search Engine Optimisation” means just that; optimising the site for the search engines to read. In layman’s terms it is basically telling Google’s computers (and bots) what your business is about so that when someone searches for your key products or services using a particular phrase or keyword, the search engine knows which websites to show them.
The SEO process used to be a simple one, when there were only a few thousand websites out there but it is no longer good enough just to keep your website fresh and up-to-date to get your business to be indexed correctly by Google, Bing or any other search engine.
In order to be successful online your website needs continuous SEO effort and some rather advanced technical “know-how” to get this absolutely right.
There are many different rules or indices that need to be applied to the various pages of your website that you would like to be indexed by Google and the more of these rules you get right, the faster you will get there.
Whenever you build a new page on your website, or a new article, blog or post, that page will eventually be indexed by Google unless you check the “Do not follow” box. To help Google along and to index it faster, we need to speak their language by giving their bots and crawlers the right tips as to what the page is about. This can be done on or off page, within the content, titles, images, headers or off-page and within the meta titles, meta descriptions and with the right url’s, title tags and keyword density.
You can also speed up the process by using the Google Search console to fetch and render the url and in a sense, asking Google to re-index the site that you have recently added new content to rather than waiting for it’s crawlers to come across it. It goes without saying that Google crawls larger, more important sites that are constantly changing, more often than it will crawl a small, less important website. That is why you might make some changes to your website and it takes 3 or 4 months to notice any change.
Finally there are the all important algorithms that the SERPS use to rank your site which range from checking your site’s health in terms of speed, broken links (which can be repaired with 301 re-directs), back-links from other reputable and relevant websites and many other indicators. If you run an SEO audit on your website or even a markup audit, you will determine where all the problems lie and then start to address each of these in a logical and strategic manner.
If your website is not ranking as well as it should and you don’t feel that the SEO has been addressed properly, you will need to apply some budget to this task and find someone that can help. Start with an audit of website, combine it with an audit of your digital footprint and then build a strategy with a budget to fix it.
We will make sure it’s done properly!