The Inner Workings of SEO

How SEO Works: The Inner Workings of SEO

Find out how Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) can help your website to rank at the top of Google’s index; find out what this means, and why you should care. How Search Engine Optimisation works – and why you should care.

Understanding SEO

SEO encompasses a range of techniques that help your pages rank higher and appear more prominently on the organic search results page. ‘Organic’ refers to the search engine’s listings of web pages that appear as a result of the search, as opposed to the advertisements that appear on the search engine’s paid results. SEO is typically geared towards getting traffic from ‘qualified’ visitors (that is, people who are likely to be more interested in what your web page is offering).

How SEO Works with Search Engines

What SEO does is make your page more appealing to search engines, such as Google. With search engines, popularity is determined by algorithms that can count how many people like your pages and how much others are linking to them. If someone asked a search engine question that relates to your site, an optimised page of yours will appear higher up on what’s called a search engine results page (SERP). Here’s a brief rundown of some of the main components of SEO.

Keywords: These are the terms that people actually type into a search engine to find what they want, so nailing your keywords is crucial if you want your copy seen by the right people. Content Quality: Fantastic material that people crave to read develops their trust, making them spend more time on your website, keep down bounce rates – and keep your rankings healthy.

Backlinks: With every other website on the planet linking to yours, each of them is sending a little vote to the search providers saying: ‘Everybody likes this article on peanut-butter sandwiches!’ The more they like it, the more value that little vote carries. • Technical SEO: This refers to the optimisations made to the ‘back end’ of your site, including site speed, mobile usability and having an https connection.

On-Page SEO

However by getting 100 links or more from external sources, you will then be on page one and not page four. On-page SEO refers to optimising the elements of your site that you are directly responsible for. Scatter your keyword ‘How SEO Works’ as naturally as possible within your copy, as well as your meta descriptions, tags, etc. What are these elements? They are the main areas making up on-page SEO and are listed and described below:

Title Tags and Meta Descriptions

Your title tag and meta description will be among the first thing the user sees in search results, so these should contain the primary keyword and give a good reason as to why the user should visit.

Headers and Content

On the other side, a descriptive usages of headers that transforms your data for the search robots to general themes of your page, while keywords in headlines helps the search engines to sieve the serve through their prepared thematic to filter it.

Image Alt Text

If better relevance from searches for those terms is an objective, you can add ‘alt text’ that explains what’s in those images for the not-quite-sighted search engines that will display your pages.

Internal Linking

You can also link out to other pages on your site to get the reader to explore more, and to explore for longer: two indications to search engines that they’ve found a proper jewel.

URL Structure

Keep your URLs short and keyword rich. The easier they are to describe, the more user-friendly and search-engine friendly they will be.

Off-Page SEO

Whereas on-page SEO covers those things on your website, off-page SEO encompasses all of those external signals coming into your website and affecting your Rankings – with the most important component being, as mentioned already, those hard-to-earn backlinks. Here are some off-page SEO tactics to try:

• Earn backlinks: Get lots of links pointing towards your content from other authoritative sources.
o Social Media Marketing: You can use Facebook, Twitter and other social media to spread the word about your content and boost visits and links.
• Guest Blogging: Write articles for other websites to reach new audiences and earn backlinks.

Technical SEO

It is possible to improve the way in which your website features in search results (and which page on your site ranks higher than others) by doing specific changes to underlying technical areas of your site. This is called technical SEO, and it can involve: 1. Amending a site’s key elements in ways that make it more discoverable to search engine web crawlers 2. Amending a site’s architecture to make it more appealing to users and to encourage them to explore and find what they need 3. Eliminating usability issues that make a site difficult for the user 4. Fixing problems that can cause errors, warnings or faulty code in the site to be displayed in the results 5 Amending it to work with current SEO techniques.

Site Speed

Not only does it deliver a superior user experience, but it will also receive more points in the searches, because search engines are naturally faster to find the specific content the user is looking for. Several free-to-use tools, such as Google PageSpeed Insights, can give good recommendations for how to improve a site’s page loading speed.

Mobile-Friendliness

Now, more users than usual are accessing the web through mobile devices; indeed, a responsive design is even a ranking factor in Google’s algorithm because it makes sure your site looks good on all devices.

SSL/HTTPS

You can make your site more secure by getting an SSL certificate, a ranking factor for Google.

XML Sitemaps and Robots.txt

An XML sitemap details what your site looks like to search engines; a robots.txt file tells search-engine crawlers what pages to ignore.

Measuring SEO Success

Finally, regardless of how much you put into SEO, it pays to check on what you’re getting in return. This might include:

• Organic Traffic: The number of visitors coming to your site via unpaid search results.
• Keyword Rankings: Track where your site ranks for specific keywords over time.
• Backlinks: Monitor the number and quality of backlinks your site earns.
• Bounce Rate and Dwell Time: Analyze how users interact with your site.

Here are tools that provide readouts for these:

• Google Analytics
• Google Search Console

Future of SEO

The nature of SEO makes it fickle, but it is also ever-changing, with updates to the algorithms and shifts in user habits driving a need to stay up to date on emerging trends and updates to stay ahead of the curve. Watch out for voice search and AI/machine-learning-driven algorithms and mobile-first indexing.

Take the Next Step

But that's just the beginning; optimising a site with SEO best practices will make a dramatic difference in their rankings and growth, and you'll likely see fast results in order to enjoy the fruits of your labour. If you’re a business in the Tampa Bay Area and want expert advice on how you can exploit both the technical and strategic aspects of SEO to meet your digital marketing goals, contact MomentumPro.