What is SEO? – SEO Explained

SEO is a form of digital marketing. Search engine optimisation considers what people will search for on the Internet and makes sure that your site has the content needed to match these searches. SEO is performed in-house by companies or freelancers like myself who are paid by clients to optimise their websites. The idea of SEO began in the mid-1990s when site owners started to recognize the value of having their websites highly ranked.

What do SEOs do?

First and foremost SEOs learn and understand how search engines work, and how they determine what web pages should rank highest for a given search query. SEO is evolving all the time as search engines get better at implementing their algorithms. SEOs carry out on-site SEO and off-site SEO in the form of link building. Onsite SEO involves (depending on the website) renaming images, pages, titles, headings, and technical issues the website may have.  Once a website ticks all the right boxes it’s finding ways to get links from other websites. e.

On-site SEO

SEOs will do onsite work which is making a website more crawlable and search engine friendly. Ensuring the proper use of page titles, and headings, making the navigation easy to crawl by the search engines and visitors. “Spiders” are web robots that explore the web via links to create an index. If they can’t find your pages or understand what they are about, the pages won’t rank or are found.  Renaming images is part of on-site SEO.  Google cannot read an image but can read what you have called it and its title and alt tag.  If your image is called abc123.jpg that is not telling google what it is about.  If an image is of say ‘pink fluffy slippers, call the image that: pink-fluffy-slippers.jpg.  When someone searches for ‘pink fluffy slippers’ and looks through the images there is much more of a chance your image will be found.

Off-site SEO

Off-site techniques primarily focus on link building. The basic of SEO is working both on-site and off-site trying different techniques to help the search engines rank their site high.

This is done in several ways.  If you have products, sending them to influences on blogs or social media could get you a mention and a link.  Offering informative content to sites that allow get you links, and there are still some strong directories that hold value.

If a website is built well enough and you are constantly working on it, adding content, and improving pages then over time it will naturally attract links from other sites.

How does Google work?

Google bots crawl links on webpages to find new pages and put them in the index which then analyzes the text. When a query is passed (someone types something in google) the query processor will compare your search query to the index and then lists pages it believes are most relevant.

SEO is the engine of any website

SEO is like the engine of any website. Without it, your site will not be found in google and will not drive much traffic. Paying for a website without SEO is like buying a car without an engine. It might look nice and pretty but it won’t go!