Search is one of the most used functions on the internet. According to Internet Live Stats, Google searches alone average 3.8 billion a day. Search engines like Google and Bing help us navigate the sea of information on the internet by sorting and surfacing the most relevant information that we are looking for. As a brand, we want to be easily found by our customers online, and this is where Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) comes into play.
How do Search Engines work?
Before we go into more detail on SEO, we must first understand how search engines work. This will help us build effective and relevant SEO strategies.
This video gives us a quick look into how search engines work:
Summary:
Search engines are constantly scanning the internet in real-time to create an archive or database, called a search index.
When we search for something, we are actually searching on the index of a search engine, not the internet in real time. The search engine matches the words we use to its search index to shortlist pages that might be relevant to our search.
In order to show us the best results, search engines use an algorithm to rank the pages based on their relevance to your search query.
These algorithms take multiple factors into consideration such as whether the words you searched were in the page title, if they were used in your specified sequence, backlinks and more.
The algorithms are constantly updated to prevent spammers and the like from gaming the system. This ensures that the search results are trustworthy and useful. It helps to be across algorithm updates to ensure your SEO strategies remain relevant.
What is SEO?
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the process of making a website and its contents more discoverable by improving its ranking on organic search results. The higher your website appears on the search results page, the more likely a user can find and access it.
As the name implies, you are ‘optimising’ your website and its contents to make it easier for ‘search engines’ to index and rank your site’s contents higher.
What is the difference between SEO and SEM?
The answer to this lies in the anatomy of the Search Engine Results Page (SERP), which is the page we see after entering a search query. The SERP is divided into two sections - paid search results, and organic or natural search results.
Paid search results are advertisements that were bought by marketers to have their website appear at the top of the SERP. You can identify these by the word ‘Ad’ next to the search results. Search Engine Marketing (SEM), also known as ‘Paid Search’ or ‘Pay-Per-Click (PPC)’ advertising, is focused on paid search results. Here, an advertiser bids for the chance to secure the first position on the SERP so that their brand or product has greater visibility.
Organic search results appear below the paid search results and make up the rest of the SERP. These are natural search results that appear without any need for bidding or payment. They are purely determined by the search engine algorithm’s decisioning system. SEO is focused on improving your sites positioning within the organic search results.
Example of SERP:
Why is SEO important?
The internet is a crowded place. It is easy for an online entity to get lost in the clutter of the internet. While search engines are doing their job to make the internet easier to navigate, we need to do all we can to help search engines find and rank us. In doing so, not only are we more visible to our customers and audiences, we create a website that is deemed relevant and useful by search engine standards.
15 SEO terms to be aware of for beginners
Traffic: This refers to the visits to your website. SEO is the means to this end goal. The higher your organic search rankings, the easier it is for people to discover your website, and this should result in more people visiting your website.
Metadata: This is fundamentally data that describes or provides information about other data. One such metadata is ‘Meta Description’ which is the HTML element that describes the contents of a webpage and often appears as the description line in Google search results.
Header Tags: This is an HTML element that designates the headers on your webpage. It separates headings and subheadings on a webpage using a ranking structure ranging from H1 to H6, with H1 being the most important heading (i.e. page title).
Keywords: These refer to a list of words that describe the contents of a webpage. ‘Seed Keywords’ are the primary words that are used to describe your product or service. ‘Long-tail Keywords’ are phrases consisting of more than 3 keywords in a search query, and are often used for greater specificity.
Alt-text: This refers to the text that is used to describe an image on your webpage. This helps search engines contextualise the image to use it in image searches, and index the webpage. This also helps readers understand what the image is meant to be if it has issues loading or if the reader is visually impaired (e.g. child hugging a puppy).
Backlinks: Backlinks are links on other websites that direct their readers to your website or webpage. The more backlinks you have, the more legitimate and trustworthy you appear to search engines as it shows the search engines that other websites use you as a reference for a particular subject. Other linking terms to be aware of are ‘Internal Linking’ which are links used to reference a particular resource or section within your website, and ‘External Linking’ which are links that reference and direct users to other websites.
Anchor Text: This is a clickable text hyperlink that leads you to a particular page or section. For example clicking on the word ‘inspiration’ will lead you to the inspiration page on this website.
Bot/Crawler/Spider: This is the program that search engines use to scan and index content on the internet.
Google Search Console: This is a tool provided by Google to help you measure your website’s search traffic and performance. With Google being the leader in the search space, it is definitely worth using this tool to help you with your SEO strategies.
Organic Ranking: This refers to the positioning of your website in the organic search results. The higher you are ranked, the more discoverable you are. In the Google Search Console, you will be able to see your ‘average positioning’ which gives you an indication of where you mostly appear in Google search results.
Sitemap: This is a list of URLs of all web pages on your website that search engine crawlers can use to index your site contents.
Black Hat: Black Hat tactics are manipulative SEO practices that violate search engines’ quality guidelines. These practices are focused on fooling search engines into ranking their website higher instead of building quality websites for people. This includes spammy tactics like ‘keyword stuffing’ which uses excessive keywords to a point of rendering the content incoherent. The opposite of Black Hat tactics are ‘White Hat’ tactics which are good SEO practices that provide people with quality content while making it easy for search engines to do their job.
Rich Snippets: These are additional information that the search engine pulls from your structured data to include in your search results. This includes things like review rating stars, or a price and availability of a product.
Structured Data: This is a standardised format for providing information about a webpage and classifying its contents. This helps search engines easily understand the contents of your webpage for indexing. Schema.org, often called ‘schema’, is an industry standard structured data vocabulary founded collaboratively by Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Yandex.
Website Authority: Also known as domain authority', this is a measure of strength of a given domain based on multiple factors such as the number of backlinks to the website and the average traffic and engagements that it receives.
SEO Resources:
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