Transcript
Hello community members! Elaine here, today I’m going to be talking about my favourite subject – SEO. We know many of you are getting started in your blogging journey. So with that in mind, I’m going to take you through a quick introduction to SEO.
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation, which is the practice of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through organic search engine results.
In other words it is a way to improve your site so that it will appear closer to the top positions in the search results. Having a higher ranking means being further up on the results page, which will typically increase the amount of visitors to your blog or website.
Why is this important? According to a 2014 study from Advanced Web Rankings, more than 67% of all clicks on result pages go to the top five listings. And other research shows that websites on the first page receive almost 95% of web traffic.
When was the last time you went to page two on Google for the answer to something? Probably a while ago, and it probably doesn’t happen often.
When teaching SEO, I always find it helpful to explain how search engines work. As I think it gives you a better understanding around how your site is shown on results pages and how to optimise your content for search engine users.
There are a lot of different search engines available like Bing, Yahoo! And Duckduckgo. But I’m going to focus on Google, because that’s what most people around the world use.
Search engines consist of three parts. The first part is the crawler, which is also known as a spider or bot. The next part is the index or database. And then finally there’s the algorithm.
The crawler travels around the web, following links going from webpage to webpage. It scans each webpage’s content and gathers information about that page. It then stores this information in the index.
When a person searches for something on Google, the algorithm sifts through the index and tries to find the most relevant information. It displays this information as a list of results, so the person can find an answer to their search query.
I like to compare Google to a taxi service. They want to get you from point A to point B as quickly and efficiently as possible, while making sure you have a good experience.
This brings me to the importance of your audience. Google’s mission is “to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”. This is why I advise keeping your user’s in mind when it comes to SEO, Google offers a service and they want their users to be happy. Yes, SEO stands for search engine optimisation, but really you are optimising for how people use search engines.
Going back to Google’s algorithm, how does it decide what results to show you? Well, there are hundreds of factors. Some sources say that Google actually have around 200 factors, though the exact details of these factors are unknown.
What we do know is that the factors are split into two groups – on-page SEO and off-page SEO. On-page SEO refers to things you can do on your own site. While off-page SEO refers to the links coming to your site and other external signals.
You’ll often hear about black-hat SEO. This is unethical tactics that may give you short-term benefits, but is likely to result in penalties and even being banning from search engines. Instead, you’ll want to create a sustainable SEO strategy by focusing on your content, your site and your user which will have better results.
Where do you start? I’m sure you’ve heard the saying “content is king” a thousand times before, and that is because blogging is amazing for SEO for many reasons. It keeps your website fresh and current, makes it easier to build links and helps you connect with your audience. When creating content link to relevant posts you’ve previously publishes and related posts on other sites too.
Another thing you’ll hear a lot when it comes to SEO is keyword research. Keyword research is the process of finding and analysing search terms that people enter into search engines. Knowing this and the intent behind that search can help you when it comes to using keywords within your content and finding things to blog about.
Creating quality content, building relationships with other bloggers and encouraging your readers to share your content on social media can help with increasing the amount of links to your site.
And of course improving the experience your readers have on your site. This includes how easy your site is to use, the page speed, if it’s mobile friendly and secure, if the text is readable and so on…
There’s an overview of search engine optimisation, how search engines work and what to focus on as you start your SEO strategy. You’ll find more SEO tips in the community hub. Don’t forget to join us in the private Facebook group!