Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the practice of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to a website through organic search engine results. It involves understanding how search engines work, what people search for, and why and how people search. Effective SEO makes a website appealing to users and search engines. It is often about making small modifications to parts of your website, which collectively could have a noticeable impact on your site’s user experience and performance in organic search results.
Key elements of SEO include:
Keyword Research: Identifying and analyzing the terms that people enter into search engines is fundamental to any SEO strategy. This involves researching, comparing, and prioritizing the best keyword opportunities for your site.
Content Creation: Content needs to be crafted to meet user demand with information, articles, keywords, and other content types. High-quality content tailored to your target audience increases site traffic, which improves your site’s authority and relevance.
On-Page SEO: This involves optimizing individual web pages in order to rank higher and earn more relevant traffic in search engines. On-page refers to both the content and HTML source code of a page that can be optimized, as opposed to off-page SEO which refers to links and other external signals.
Technical SEO: This ensures that a website meets the technical requirements of modern search engines with the goal of improved organic rankings. Important elements include crawling, indexing, rendering, and website architecture.
Off-Page SEO: Strategies outside of the actual website can help improve the site’s position in search rankings. These include improving the perception of a site’s popularity, relevance, trustworthiness, and authority through linking or promotion by other reputable places on the Internet (pages, sites, people, etc.).
Local SEO: This focuses on optimizing a business’s online presence so that its web pages will be displayed by search engines when users enter local searches for its products or services. Local SEO includes the management of online reviews and ratings, local-centric social media engagement, and beyond.
SEO Analytics and Monitoring: Tools and protocols used to monitor various aspects of SEO such as search rankings, traffic statistics, backlinks, and more help in understanding the effectiveness of the strategies used. Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and other third-party tools offer extensive means to measure the success of an SEO strategy.
The goal of SEO is to ensure that a site is accessible to a search engine and improves the chances that the site will be found by the search engine. It is an integral part of any digital marketing strategy and is the basis of driving organic traffic to a website.