Search Engine Optimisation - What Is It?

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the process of getting a website to rank better on the search engines using various strategies both on-site and off-site.

One of the biggest differences between SEO and something like paid advertising is the fact that search engine rankings are organic. They aren’t paired for and don’t have incremental costs associated with it. to make it even more simple, the process of SEO involves finding and targeting the right keywords, optimising content, and more. That way, your website shows up when someone searches for something related to your site.

For instance, if someone searches for “vegan pizza” on their favourite search engine, they are typically going to be looking for a good recipe they can follow. If you’ve written an article on how to make vegan pizza, that’s someone that you would want to head to your site. To get people to your site through an organic search like this, you’ll need to have your content ranking as high as possible for “vegan pizza.” While it’s not easy to do, this is the reason SEO is so important.

We will break things down even further. Most Internet searches begin on a search engine. The most popular being Google. As many as 75 per cent of the searches are made on Google. Therefore, it’s easily the most important to focus on.

To fully understand how to go about getting your content to rank as high as possible on Google and other search engines, you’ll need to learn more about how searches and algorithms work. Try approaching a company that specialises in this area, SEO agency Basingstoke can guide you along the way.

The purpose of this article is to teach you how to effectively get your content ranking higher within the search engines. That way you can get your content optimised and ranking as high as possible for various keywords and phrases.

Some Core Elements Of SEO: Both On-Site and Off-Site

When you’re talking about broader SEO, two different paths are equally important. This includes both on-site and off-site SEO.

On-Page SEO

This is all about building out content to improve your rankings. You should be incorporating a lot of keywords on your pages to target specific keywords you want to rank for. You want to craft high-quality content to ensure you are putting out content people will want to check out. Your titles should be optimised for various keywords that you’re targeting and you want to use the right keywords in your metatags too.

Off-Page SEO

This is what you do off your website when you are looking to boost your rankings. Anything that you do off-page that relates to your SEO goes into this category. This includes link building and everything else. This is just as important as the things you do on-site to get your website ranking high.

SEO Strategies: Black and White Hat

I’ve always been someone that has been embracing my entrepreneurial spirit. This is truly the way to go if you want to benefit the most. While it’s not something for everyone, it’s certainly a way to build something long-lasting.

When it relates to SEO, you don’t want to go for quick gains. Anything that is going to yield quick gains in SEO is typically shunned by Google and considered ‘black hat tactics.’ These typically include various things like stuffing keywords into your content, link scraping, and more. While you might see short term results with these things, they aren’t going to be long lasting. It could end up getting your website penalised in the future. Google doesn’t like websites that leverage black hat tactics.

Whereas, white hat strategies are things that Google actively encourages and embraces. These are the strategies that take a while to experience results from. They are a much more sustainable way to build your business. If you are doing things the right way, you are mostly focusing on your human audience and not trying to ‘game’ the algorithm.

This means you are working your hardest to produce the highest quality content that ranks because it’s something people want to consume.

Thing To Avoid: Duplicate Content

This is something that you need to be very careful to avoid. Google and other search engines hate duplicate content. A lot of black hat techniques use duplicate content to try to publish more content. Google will punish your site if you are doing this which will make it much harder to rank well.