SEO for beginners! Popular SEO tools and web optimisation.
SEO features many moving parts which come together to increase your website’s visibility on search engines.
Search engines use algorithms to rank both website usability and relevancy to search intention.
Now it is copywriting which focusses on targeting relevant search terms, or keywords. Backlinks are also important for website relevancy. The more reputable sources your site links to, the more relevant, by Google standards, it is to your topic.
Before we dive deeper, don’t worry, there are professionals available to run audits on website usability and SEO function.
But do worry about how your site appears on mobiles when building it; easy solution? The in-built Mobile View available through most web-building software
As well as considering website design, Google ranks websites based on certain codes, crawled by bots for keywords, and therefore relevancy. Think the all-important title tag, which essentially describes a web page’s main content.
Image tags, codes which describe images, serve a similar function. And meta descriptions?
That stretch of text, under your webpage’s title on Google Search Engine Result Pages entices consumers to your site. The more clear and compelling, the higher the engagement. However, Google doesn’t care whether the description contains ranking keywords, simply because it does not analyse meta descriptions to optimise search results.
This may be because Google sometimes rewrites said descriptions, usually by adding or deleting text.
Other website components, including URL slugs and formatting, while not direct determinants of SEO, similarly improve readability and therefore engagement.
As a business leader, you must also analyse business performance. This includes tracking keywords. Primary keywords, or a focal search term, alongside secondary keywords, perhaps synonyms for or variations on a primary key term.
One Fun Fact: It takes six months, on average, to improve keyword visibility.
And easy code, like the Title Tag, can be changed by the novice through web-building platforms, like Squarespace.
A/B tests are another industry standard. Here, variations of one element of a webpage are tested for success.
And it is Google Analytics, king of website analysis, which calculates and runs base performance metrics.
Some popular performance measures?
Number of users and sessions: ‘Users’ represents the number of unique individuals visiting a website, ‘sessions’ the number of times that users visit a site.
Bounce rate: % of users visiting one page on a website before leaving the site altogether.
Goal conversion rate: The definition of a conversion rate may be self-explanatory but how to define site goals? Typical goals are consumer interactions with a website, ranging from purchase-making to visiting a specific webpage.
Now, if there were an easy SEO solution, it would be Google Business, Google’s inbuilt optimisation tool.
Google Business Profile, formerly Google My Business, is an online business registry. It lets you enter key information about your business.
This, in turn, helps Google index your business for search results. Sign up immediately! Registration is very easy, requiring only a few fields, like location and a business description. Yet, many newbies skip the full process.
Lastly, in web optimisation, don't lose sight of your end goal: to give people what they want.
People’s interests are always changing, meaning that website relevancy is not guaranteed. Regular keyword research is recommended to ensure target keywords are reaching desired demographics.
That said, niche groups, say Adult Roblox fans, are loyal to their selective interests, meaning that keywords typical of their field do not lose relevancy easily.
But recall: keyword research is only one part of the greater SEO puzzle. Yes, keywords and backlinks do improve site relevancy. But keywords alone won't guarantee a high ranking.
All entrepreneurs should carefully complete the fields in Google Business Profiles, which are easy tick-boxes for SEO rank. I also strongly recommend running a website audit to improve its visibility.
And Google Analytics. After all, what’s strategy without performance measures?
And so, we come full circle. Firstly, the technical, as well as non-technical aspects of SEO were described. Then, audits introduced to determine the easy-win of SEO strategy. Thank me when your page ranks.