Search Engine Optimisation

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the practice of improving the quantity and quality of traffic to a website from search engines through organic search results. In simpler terms, it is the process of improving your website to rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs) for specific keywords and phrases that are relevant to your business or industry.

In the world of digital marketing, SEO has become an important part of any successful online strategy, which helps you increase visibility, attract more traffic, and ultimately generate more revenue.?

SEO can be broadly categorised into two types: On-page and Off-page SEO, which focus on improving the content and structure of the website respectively. Then there's also Technical SEO, which deals with the backend, with more technical aspects that affect a website's ranking on search engines.

On-Page SEO

On-page SEO refers to optimising individual pages on a website to rank higher and earn more relevant traffic in search engines.?

Google created a short video that explains pretty well how search works. Although it has some age to it, the process has remained fundamentally similar.?

Search engines value high-quality, informative content that satisfies the user's search intent and in order to be able to provide just that, you need to:

• Conduct keyword research to find the most relevant keywords to target for your content. This involves researching and identifying relevant keywords and phrases that potential customers might use when searching for products or services similar to yours. Using tools like Google Keyword Planner or SEMrush , you can discover popular keywords with low competition and incorporate them into your website's content to improve its ranking.
• Ensure that your content is well-written, well-structured, and easily readable by both humans and search engines. High-quality and engaging content is a must for SEO. Search engines prioritise websites that have fresh, unique, and relevant content. Creating content that focuses on your target keywords can also improve your website's ranking.
• Include images and videos to enhance your content and engage users. They're an excellent way to make your content more engaging and visually appealing, which can help keep users on your website for longer periods of time. When a user spends more time on your website, it signals to search engines that your content is valuable and relevant, which can improve your search engine rankings. Including images and videos in your content can also help break up long blocks of text and make your content easier to read and understand.
• Provide internal links to related pages on your website to keep users on your website longer and help search engines understand the structure of your website. When you're linking to other relevant pages on your website, you're not only helping users navigate through your content, but you also signal to search engines that these pages are related and should be considered together. This helps search engines understand the structure of your website and the hierarchy of your content.

Off-Page SEO

Off-page SEO is the process of optimising a website through external factors such as links, social media, and other online marketing efforts. One of the most important aspects of off-page SEO is link building. Links from other websites to your website are seen as votes of confidence from search engines, and can significantly improve your website's rankings.

Acquiring links that you didn’t ask for is the nirvana of SEO. It's always something that you should be striving for and building towards over the long term. - Paddy Moogan

Since link building is in itself a huge topic on SEO, I'll probably try covering this topic in a separate future article. But if you're in need of comprehensive material on link building and you need it all in one place, you could check this article on moz.com .?

Now, just remember that not all links are created equal. Links from high-authority websites are more valuable than links from low-quality websites, and too many links from spammy websites can actually hurt your website's rankings. It's important to focus on building high-quality, relevant links that will provide real value to your website. A few strategies that usually work for link building are:

• Guest Blogging: Writing content for other websites in your niche, and including a link back to your own website in your author bio or within the content. Buffer , a social media scheduling tool, used guest blogging as a key part of their marketing strategy, which helped them grow their user base from zero to over 100,000 users in just nine months. By creating high-quality content for other websites in their industry, Buffer was able to establish themselves as thought leaders and attract new users to their platform.
• Broken Link Building: Finding broken links on other websites, and reaching out to the website owner to suggest that they replace the broken link with a link to your website. While broken link building can be more time-consuming than other SEO techniques, it can still be a valuable way to acquire high-quality, relevant backlinks that can have a positive impact on your website's search engine rankings.
• Infographics: Creating high-quality, informative infographics that other websites will want to share, and including a link back to your website in the infographic. According to a study by Venngage, infographics are 30 times more likely to be read than a text-only article, and can generate up to 178% more inbound links. This shows the potential impact that high-quality infographics can have on a website's search engine rankings and overall visibility.
• Social Media: Integrating your social media profiles with your website can help increase your website's exposure and drive traffic to your site. By sharing your website's content on social media, you can reach a wider audience and increase the chances of getting backlinks and engagement.

Technical SEO

As the name clearly suggests, technical SEO deals with aspects on the development side of a website. It involves notions such as website speed, crawlability, structured data, zero duplicate content, mobile-friendliness and security.?

Website speed is an essential factor in determining a website's search engine ranking. According to Google, websites that load faster rank higher in search results. To improve website speed, web developers can consider using a content delivery network (CDN) to distribute website content to users from servers located closest to them.

Crawlability refers to how easily search engine bots can crawl and index website content. To ensure crawlability, web developers need to create XML sitemaps that provide a blueprint of the website's content and structure to search engines.

Mobile-friendliness is another critical factor in website optimization, as over 50% of web traffic comes from mobile devices. You can find out why this is essential for web developers in the Mobile-First Development article I wrote when I started this series.

Structured data is a technique that enables web developers to provide context to search engines about the website's content. By using structured data, web developers can help search engines understand the website's content better and display relevant search results to users.

Security is always an important aspect, and an essential one when talking about search engine optimisation, as websites that are not secure may be penalised by search engines. To ensure website security, web developers have to use HTTPS, a secure communication protocol that encrypts data between the website and its users.

Zero duplicate content refers to the practice of ensuring that a website has no duplicate content, or that the same content is not available at multiple URLs. Duplicate content can negatively impact a website's search engine ranking, as search engines may have difficulty determining which version of the content to display in search results.

So, is it worth it?

Yes! It's true that SEO might be among the most time consuming activities when doing web development, but there's a reason why it generated whole new departments and skill sets altogether. You now have SEO specialists, marketing and social media departments, that work closely with web developers to implement SEO strategies. While it's not a process that shows immediate results, and the search engine algorithms are changing constantly, SEO is a winning choice in the long run.?