What is SEO?

This is something that people always ask me. You’re an SEO consultant? What does that even mean?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation – its the way of making your website rank up the search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo. So if you type in something you are looking for (a keyword), those websites that rank higher up the page get clicked on more often and for that reason, competitive businesses want their website ranking high on Google to acquire new customers.

With around 90% of the internet users in the UK using Google over other search engines, making websites rank high on Google is our priority. As SEO consultants, we use a variety of techniques to make websites more visible across hundreds and thousands of keywords that potential customers could be typing in.

WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN SEO AND PPC?

Taking a basic Google search below, you may notice how the first two/three adverts on the top of the page and on the side of the page are adverts. This is paid advertising on Google and is usually coloured in orange or yellow to distinguish itself from organic search rankings. To be listed in these adverts, you need to sign up for a Google Adwords account and once your website is listed, you can choose a number of keywords to target and you pay per click where the higher the position, the more you pay.

So the listings in white are not adverts, these are searches which Google selects as being the most relevant and in order to get up that list, you need to be using a variety of search engine optimisation techniques which we discuss below.

HOW DO YOU MAKE A WEBSITE RANK BETTER ON GOOGLE USING SEO?

People ask me this all the time and I describe it in the following ways. Google is not a mind reader. You need to be doing various practices to tell Google exactly who you are and what you do. Google wants to be give users the best information possible when they search for something. If Google can deliver useful results, people will always trust them and keep coming up back for more. And if you ask me, they’ve done it pretty well so far.

The main two ways to rank you website better on Google are as follows:

1. CONTENT

You need to put relevant content on your website telling Google who you are and what you want to rank for. Relevant content includes having relevant text on your website and this includes body text, headings, the URL that displays in the toolbar and everything behind the scenes. You will notice that for this blog post, I have optimised the page from a content perspective because I am writing about what SEO is. I have included this in the URL of the post, the headings, the content and the tags (you will notice at the bottom of the post). In other words, I am making it abundantly clear so that when Google crawls one site, they will know exactly what this page is about.</p

2. LINKS

Another vital way to boost your Google rankings is to get quality links to your website. Google believes that by having a link from another website, its almost as if you are being endorsed or recommended by someone and therefore you are more useful and deserve recognition. The more authoritative the website, the more it will value your rankings. Websites that are high in authority include government, news and education websites and it would be valuable to have your link placed on one of their websites. On the flip side, having a link on a small website that nobody reads will not add value to your rankings. Good links are those that are relevant to what you do. If you offer loans, you want to have your link on other loan or finance-related websites. This indicates to Google that you offer something loan or finance related and will only have a positive effect.

THE EXTRA BITS

Other things that will help your rankings involve creating a good user experience e.g offering images, videos, social share buttons. Google will take into account how long users are staying on the site and whether they are clicking on various pages. If you are relevant and people hang around, your rankings will reflect it.

BLACK HAT SEO

When people caught on that Google liked links and content to boost their rankings, naturally the man on the street started to abuse it. Adding lots of duplicate content and getting thousands of links from irrelevant sites used to help your rankings in the short run and this was known as dark hat or black hat SEO. Something in the middle is called Grey Hat.

But bad behaviour will catch up with you and several sites have been penalised for executing black hat techniques and they have dramatically fallen down the rankings or Google has removed their website via Google Panda Updates.

At Tudor Lodge Consultants, we are an SEO agency proud to offer only white-hat techniques which are in the spirit of good, clean SEO and will stand the test of time. Feel free to contact us for a free SEO audit so we can help improve your search engine optimisation rankings today.