Scratching the Surface of SEO

When I joined Venn a short while ago, straight out of university, I had no idea what PPC or SEO was or why they were important. However after some initial training, research and hundreds of questions to people around the office (unfortunately for them) I got to grips with the concepts of PPC and SEO and why they are important in the world of digital.

Coming from university any student will tell you that search engines like Google and Bing are the lifeblood of essays, research projects and settling trivial debates. However, there is a hidden science behind how pages reach the top results of a search query, this is Search Engine Optimisation.

Most people will continue to use Google without ever knowing just how websites get ranked on search engine result pages and exactly why this is important. I had no idea how the rankings were generated until I started working within SEO and began to get to grips with the basics. So take a look at my brief recap if you want to delve into the exciting world of SEO!

Anyone who has their own website will tell you that traffic is key, and appearing in searches is key to traffic, but no website starts off at the top of a Google search. Most companies and their webmasters should be using SEO techniques to get as high as they can on the results pages. The extra traffic can be the difference between a successful business and a failing one.

Search engine optimisation works by processing your site and deciding whether or not it is helpful to anyone who uses the search engine. Sites like Google and Bing use various algorithms to process all the information from every crawled webpage and determine how useful the website is. The resulting information is what ranks your site.

Your rankings can be vastly improved if you are mindful of all the key factors that the search engine wants, for example:

Words

One of the important parts is creating rich content which users will want to share and send to everyone! This engaging content and any resulting reputable backlinks shows the search engine that your page has a good reputation and boosts you in the SERPs.

When a search engine’s algorithm goes to work it will look through every word on the pages within a site and ranks the site based on if the words match what someone has searched for.

Titles

Titles are important, Google’s algorithm will scan through your website and see the titles within your code and this will make your website more relevant to the search query, thus optimising your site giving you a better rank. By ensuring that your titles stay relevant to the search queries being entered, you can make sure that your site is enticing to any web users who may be looking for something related to what you do.

Links

Search engines will look at sites which have links leading to them and it will judge is they are trusted for example: www.leafsaregreen.co.uk will not have the same impact as www.skysports.com or www.gov.uk. Google will in turn crawl and pages included in the links where it will be able to recognise any trusted sources which then will contribute towards your rank. There are also paid links where someone will put a link to your page on their site for something in return however Google is trying to devalue them.

Google+

With Google+ if you have an account and are signed up to Authorship your beautiful face will appear next to content that you are linked to, and those who stumble upon your work will be able to distinguish you from the crowd and know that your content is valid.

Content

These factors only just scratch the surface of SEO. They’re the basic building blocks that can help to bring in more traffic and, in turn, revenue to a website. There are also a lot of companies looking to get the best people in to help them get to the top of the search ladder.

SEO has become a necessity in generating traffic towards websites. After all, the higher you are the more traffic you can potentially get and that means more people visiting your site and a greater potential for them to become customers.