What is SEO?
Today I want to look at exactly what is SEO, and why is it important if you have a website for your business.
SEO stands for “search engine optimisation” – it’s the means by which you can increase the quality and quantity of website traffic, though non-paid search engine results.
Basically, it’s where you work on your website to optimise it as much as possible for those people online who might be trying to find you. For example, if you are a dentist in Cardigan, you’d expect to rank on the search engines fairly high for those three keywords: “dentist in Cardigan”. If you weren’t ranking well, then you need to spend some time optimising your website.
Why is it important?
It’s really important to make sure your website works well for your business, without you having to pay for advertisements. This sort of traffic, those who find you without advertising, is called organic traffic. The more organic traffic you can get, the better – and today, 2021, the majority of online traffic is still driven by search engines (despite how popular social media is!).
There’s also the element of credibility too, if it’s very hard for someone to find you on the search engines, it might genuinly affect how you are perceived as a business too. This is also why I recommend that every business should have a website too, and not rely on social media for marketing.
Where do you start?
So SEO is quite a huge sector, which just shows really how important it is to be honest. There are a LOT of things you can be doing constantly to keep on top of your optimisation, and it’s really important to remember – this never stops! Don’t just launch your website and then do nothing, you need to work on the SEO all of the time in some way.
Here’s a list of basic things you need to do:
- Always bear your audience in mind – write your content for your visitors and NOT for the search engines. It’s all about quality and being informative, not trying to play the SEO “game”.
- Make sure all of your pages have the correct Header tags
- Add Alt-Tags onto your images
- Write new content for your website consistently – blogging and news is a great way to do this, and it also gives you a way to answer customer or visitor questions or queries too
- Add and use internal links through your website (especially if you mention your services or other blog pieces)
As I said though, SEO is a huge topic and I’ll start covering it a lot more over the coming months in bitesize chunks – but hopefully this is a good starting point for you to see how important SEO it, and possibly how large a topic!
You can also check out my blogs over on Gwe Cambrian Web – some will be in more detail over there as we focus a lot more on websites and website optimisation as part of the company!