Here we’ll take a look at the basic things you need to know
in regards to search engine optimisation, a discipline that everyone in
your organisation should at least be aware of, if not have a decent
technical understanding.
One of our most popular articles of all time is a post entitled SEO Basics: 8 Essentials When Optimizing Your Site. It still does the business for us in terms of traffic, however it was first published in April 2013, so you can treat this as its long overdue and expanded update.
The methods vary from technical practices you can achieve behind the scenes on your website (we tend to refer to this as ‘on-page SEO’) to all the promotional ’off-page’ approaches you can use to raise your site’s visibility (link-building, social media marketing).
For the purpose of this article, when we talk about visibility, we mean how high up the SERP your website appears for certain search terms in the ‘organic’ results. Organic results refer to those that appear naturally on the page, rather than in the paid-for sections…
Paid search is also a large part of search engine marketing. You can read more about this in our recent beginner’s guide to paid search and PPC.
When it comes to how much traffic is driven by search engines to your website, the percentage is substantial, and perhaps the clearest indicator of the importance of SEO.
In 2014, Conductor suggested 64% of all web traffic comes from organic search, compared to 2% from social, 6% from paid search, 12% direct and 15% from other referral sources.
This tallies with our own data, with approximately 70-75% of SEW traffic coming from organic.
Of all organic traffic, in 2015 it was found that Google accounts for more than 90% of global organic search traffic. So obviously you need a strong presence on Google SERPs, but how strong?
Well, according to this study from Advanced Web Ranking (which I’ve trotted out before when discussing how to dominate Google) shows that on the first SERP, the top five results account for 67.60% of all clicks and the results from six to 10 account for only 3.73%.
It’s therefore vital that your site appears in the top five results.
How are you going to achieve this? With the following tips, which I’ve split into two categories: what search engines are looking for and… drum roll… what they’re not looking for.
How search engines provide these results is down to their own
internal algorithms, which we’ll probably never truly determine, but
there are factors that you can be certain will influence these results
and they’re all based around relevancy… For instance: a searcher’s
location, their search history, time of day/year, etc.
Basically, stop worrying about keywords and focus on the user experience.
Internal linking has many advantages:
However as the aforementioned Searchmetrics research suggests, year-on-year correlations between backlinks and rankings are decreasing, so perhaps over time ‘links’ may not be as important to SEO as we once thought.
There’s a good argument raging in the comments to this recent piece on links as a marketing KPI, which offers some diverse views on the subject.
The meta description is the short paragraph of text that appears under your page’s URL in the search results, it’s also something you should have complete control of in your CMS.
Here it is in WordPress:
Write succinctly (under 156 characters is good), clearly and make sure it’s relevant to your headline and the content of the article itself.
There is more guidance found here: how to write meta descriptions for SEO.
Title tags are used to tell search engines and visitors what your site is about in the most concise and accurate way possible. The keywords in your title tag show up highlighted in search engine results (if the query uses those keywords), as well as in your browser tab and when sharing your site externally.
You can write your own title tag inside the <head> area of your site’s HTML:
<head>
<title>Example Title</title>
</head>
You should use a few accurate keywords describing the page as well as your own brand name. Only use relevant keywords though, and the most important thing to consider is that although you are formatting for search engines, you should write for humans.
There is a lot more practical guidance to be found in our complete guide to title tags.
Schema is also the preferred method of markup by most search engines including Google, and it’s fairly straightforward to use. For more information, check out our handy guide to Schema.
By describing your image in the alt text as accurately as possible it will increase the chances of your images appearing in Google Image search.
It will also improve the accessibility of your site for people using ‘screen reader’ software.
One of our most popular articles of all time is a post entitled SEO Basics: 8 Essentials When Optimizing Your Site. It still does the business for us in terms of traffic, however it was first published in April 2013, so you can treat this as its long overdue and expanded update.
What is SEO?
Quite simply, SEO is the umbrella term for all the methods you can use to ensure the visibility of your website and its content on search engine results pages (SERPs).The methods vary from technical practices you can achieve behind the scenes on your website (we tend to refer to this as ‘on-page SEO’) to all the promotional ’off-page’ approaches you can use to raise your site’s visibility (link-building, social media marketing).
For the purpose of this article, when we talk about visibility, we mean how high up the SERP your website appears for certain search terms in the ‘organic’ results. Organic results refer to those that appear naturally on the page, rather than in the paid-for sections…
Why do you need SEO?
Building a strong site architecture and providing clear navigation will help search engines index your site quickly and easily. This will also, more importantly, provide visitors with a good experience of using your site and encourage repeat visits. It’s worth considering that Google is increasingly paying attention to user experience.When it comes to how much traffic is driven by search engines to your website, the percentage is substantial, and perhaps the clearest indicator of the importance of SEO.
In 2014, Conductor suggested 64% of all web traffic comes from organic search, compared to 2% from social, 6% from paid search, 12% direct and 15% from other referral sources.
This tallies with our own data, with approximately 70-75% of SEW traffic coming from organic.
Of all organic traffic, in 2015 it was found that Google accounts for more than 90% of global organic search traffic. So obviously you need a strong presence on Google SERPs, but how strong?
Well, according to this study from Advanced Web Ranking (which I’ve trotted out before when discussing how to dominate Google) shows that on the first SERP, the top five results account for 67.60% of all clicks and the results from six to 10 account for only 3.73%.
How are you going to achieve this? With the following tips, which I’ve split into two categories: what search engines are looking for and… drum roll… what they’re not looking for.
What are search engines looking for?
1) Relevancy
Search engines try to provide the most relevant results to a searcher’s query, whether it’s a simple answer to the question “how old is Ryan Gosling?” (the answer of which Google will likely provide without you having to leave the SERP) to more complicated queries such as “what is the best steak restaurant nearest to me?”
2) The quality of your content
Do you regularly publish helpful, useful articles, videos or other types of media that are popular and well produced? Do you write for actual human beings rather than the search engine itself? Well, you should. Latest research from Searchmetrics on ranking factors indicates that Google is moving further towards longer-form content that understands a visitor’s intention as a whole, instead of using keywords based on popular search queries to create content.Basically, stop worrying about keywords and focus on the user experience.
3) User experience
There are many SEO benefits for providing the best possible user experience. You need an easily navigable, clearly searchable site with relevant internal linking and related content. All the stuff that keeps visitors on your webpage and hungry to explore further.4) Site speed
How quickly your webpages load is increasingly becoming a differentiator for search engines. Google may soon start labelling results that are hosted on Accelerated Mobile Page (AMP) so this may possibly be the ‘mobilegeddon’ of 2016. Speaking of which…5) Cross-device compatibility
Is your website and its content equally optimised for any given screen size or device? Bear in mind that Google has stated that responsive design is its preferred method of mobile optimisation.6) Internal linking
We’ve talked about the benefits of ensuring your site has clear and easy-to-use navigation, but there’s also a practice that editors and writers can carry out when publishing articles to help push traffic around the site and that may lead to higher trust signals for Google: internal linking. (See what we did there.)Internal linking has many advantages:
- It provides your audience with further reading options. As long as they’re relevant and you use clear anchor text (the clickable highlighted words in any give link). This can help reduce your bounce rates.
- It helps to improve your ranking for certain keywords. If we want this article to rank for the term ’SEO basics’ then we can begin linking to it from other posts using variations of similar anchor text. This tells Google that this post is relevant to people searching for ‘SEO basics’. Some experts recommend varying your anchor text pointing to the same page as Google may see multiple identical uses as ‘suspicious’.
- It helps Google crawl and index your site. Those little Googlebots that are sent out to fetch new information on your site will have a better idea of how useful and trustworthy your content is, the more they crawl your internal links.
7) Authority
An authority website is a site that is trusted by its users, the industry it operates in, other websites and search engines. Traditionally a link from an authority website is very valuable, as it’s seen as a vote of confidence. The more of these you have, and the higher quality content you produce, the more likely your own site will become an authority too.However as the aforementioned Searchmetrics research suggests, year-on-year correlations between backlinks and rankings are decreasing, so perhaps over time ‘links’ may not be as important to SEO as we once thought.
There’s a good argument raging in the comments to this recent piece on links as a marketing KPI, which offers some diverse views on the subject.
8) Meta descriptions and title tags
Having a meta description won’t necessarily improve your ranking on the SERP, but it is something you should definitely use before publishing an article as it can help increase your chances of a searcher clicking on your result.The meta description is the short paragraph of text that appears under your page’s URL in the search results, it’s also something you should have complete control of in your CMS.
Here it is in WordPress:
Write succinctly (under 156 characters is good), clearly and make sure it’s relevant to your headline and the content of the article itself.
There is more guidance found here: how to write meta descriptions for SEO.
Title tags are used to tell search engines and visitors what your site is about in the most concise and accurate way possible. The keywords in your title tag show up highlighted in search engine results (if the query uses those keywords), as well as in your browser tab and when sharing your site externally.
You can write your own title tag inside the <head> area of your site’s HTML:
<head>
<title>Example Title</title>
</head>
You should use a few accurate keywords describing the page as well as your own brand name. Only use relevant keywords though, and the most important thing to consider is that although you are formatting for search engines, you should write for humans.
There is a lot more practical guidance to be found in our complete guide to title tags.
9) Schema markup
You can make your search results appear more attractive by adding Schema markup to the HTML of your pages. This can help turn your search results into a rich media playground, adding star-ratings, customer ratings, images, and various other bits of helpful infoSchema is also the preferred method of markup by most search engines including Google, and it’s fairly straightforward to use. For more information, check out our handy guide to Schema.
10) Properly tagged images
Many people forget to include the alt attribute when they upload images to their content, but this is definitely something you shouldn’t overlook because Google cannot ‘see’ your images, but can ‘read’ the alt text.By describing your image in the alt text as accurately as possible it will increase the chances of your images appearing in Google Image search.
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