You may have heard of the term SEO but do you know what it is?
I’m Danni, Digital Marketer at F8! I spend a lot of my work time optimising websites for F8 clients. Let me explain what it is and why it is so important to your business…
So what is SEO?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation and is the process of improving the quality and quantity of website traffic to a website from search engines… Basically getting more people to find you on Google and visit your site!
Let’s use an example…
You’re looking for some vegetarian food in Worcester so head to Google and search for ‘vegetarian food Worcester’. A place pops up at the top of the searches, you click to their website and decide to order. SEO is what made this happen!
A page or piece of content on that website has been optimised for the keyword ‘vegetarian food Worcester’, or something similar, and this has helped that page to climb to the top of the search results.
How does it work?
Google has little digital robots, or ‘Bots’, that crawl websites, gathering information about the pages and giving them a ‘score’. This score is decided by looking at a number of factors, which have different weightings based on its importance to the overall SEO.
What are the different areas of SEO?
When optimising a site there are a number of different areas you need to take into account and make sure you correctly optimise for. These are:
Keyword research
Each page on your website should be optimised to target a different keyword. This means that when someone searches for that word or phrase in Google, you hope that your page will show up in search results for it.
For example a vegan cafe might want to target ‘vegan cafe’ for their homepage and ‘vegan cakes’ on a page about their cake making services.
You’ll want to make sure that you choose a keyword that is appropriate for the page and already has a number of people searching for it regularly.
Meta descriptions and meta titles
These are what people will see for your page when they search for something in Google. These need to make the person want to click on your link!
Let’s have a look at the F8 Contact page for example:
The meta title is the large bit in almost purplish writing. You need to make sure this includes the keyword you’re targeting that page for (so creative design agency), as well at the site name (F8 Creates Ltd).
The meta description is the text just below that, which explains what the page is about and should make the user want to click on your link and make them see it as the most relevant for what they were searching for.
Optimising page content
As each page will be targeting a specific keyword, you’ll need to make sure that the content on the page is also optimised to this keyword. There are lots of subtle ways to do this.
There are certain practises that may seem like they will boost your rankings but in fact can do the complete opposite and negatively impact your SEO. For example, keyword stuffing (putting it in LOTS of places on a page) is a big no no!
Image alt tags
Image alt (alternative) tags are used to describe the appearance/function of an image on a page. These are very important to include as they help visually impaired users with screen readers to better understand the content on the page by reading the alt text.
For SEO, if you can, try and include the pages keyword in the alt tag. However remember to make sure it is still readable for screen readers.
Do I need to be doing SEO for my business?
If you want your website to appear in the results for lots of Google searches, then the answer is yes!
Not sure where to start with it? Get in touch with our Digital Marketer Danni
