GNZY
A new gen digital marketing agency aimed to help businesses stand out to gen z and millennial audiences.
In a nutshell, SEO is short for “Search Engine Optimisation” and is a marketing practice with a goal to increase the visibility of a website on search engine results pages (SERPs) (think Google, Bing and Yahoo). This practice involves techniques such as website optimisation, building backlinks and improving the website's technical structure (we’ll look further into these in a moment).
The techniques aforementioned, all work in favour of reaching top rank in SERPS for specific key words and phrases related to your company. You see, search engines have a way of filtering through the 1.13 billion (and counting) websites on the entire internet.
When you enter a search query into Google (or any search engine for that matter) and click enter to search, this triggers the google programme to set off their “crawlers” (sometimes also known as “spiders” or “bots”) to follow a set of URLs scanning each page as they make their way through the paths of webpages. They start off from a set of seed pages and make their way exploring the web through links. What they’re looking for essentially is particular information (related to the techniques we’ll be delving into in a bit) to discover the best and most relevant content to the search entered.
At ground level it may sound simple, but once you delve beneath the surface, a lot is going on. Search engine algorithms are constantly evolving and changing to appease user needs. And while this is great from a user experience perspective, it sure makes it hard to keep on top of the requirements to remain competitive in appearing on top of SERPS.
What’s more, you’ll be up against other websites in a competition to remain on top for specific key words and phrases. It’s this consistent, never-ending battle that takes time and plenty of effort. That’s why most companies who want to remain competitive with their SEO either hire an SEO manager or outsource an agency to take care of this.
As I mentioned earlier, there are several factors that search engines consider when ranking websites, including the relevance and quality of the content, the structure and coding of the website, and the quality and quantity of backlinks pointing to the website. SEO works by optimizing all of these factors to make it easier for search engines to understand and rank your website. Let’s look into these factors in detail:
High-quality and valuable content is vital for SEO. Not only does this provide useful and attractive content for users, but search engines will also prioritise this.
These are the words or phrases that people will enter into a search engine when looking for information. Utilising these words and phrases into the copy of your website will help search engines understand the relevance of your site to these queries.
There are multiple ways to optimise your website. These include optimising page titles, headings, URLs, meta tags, image alt tags and keyword placement.
These are links to your website from other sites. Search engines see these as authoritative or as votes of confidence and thus will positively impact your SEO ranking the more you have. However, these backlinks must be from reputable sources and should have relevance to you, otherwise your SEO could be impacted negatively.
UX is a highly important factor to consider. Search engines will look at factors such as the website speed, mobile-friendliness, navigation and user satisfaction (measured by bounce rates and other similar metrics).
This allows for search engine crawlers to better scan through your website. Factors include website speed, responsiveness, HTML tags, XML sitemaps and data markup all influence SEO rankings.
Whether this has a direct impact on ranking is still up for debate. But social signals such as shares, likes and comments still impact your website traffic which could also impact your visibility. What’s more, promoting your engaging content through social media in a way that attracts shares and likes can potentially lead to more backlink opportunities.
So overall, this gives a very basic overview of SEO and how it is influenced. There is much more to be said on this topic, which is why we will continue to cover the grounds through our blog. So, keep an eye out and if you have any questions, don’t hesitate to contact us.
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