Search Engine Optimisation, or SEO for short, is a process that is used to improve the amount of traffic to websites and get higher ranks.
View WhitepaperSearch Engine Optimisation, or SEO for short, is a process that is used to improve the amount of traffic to websites and get higher ranks. But most people don’t really know how this actually works, so here’s what you need to know about SEO.
The traffic mentioned above for your website can come from different places, categorised as; free, paid, editorial, organic, and direct. But what do those words mean?
Social media, online groups, forums, blog posts, and video platforms are all forms of free traffic. Social media lets you create profiles and pages to help advertise your content and create a name for yourself whilst people share it around.
Online groups and forums are good for interacting with other people in the same industry as yourself and sharing your website with them.
Blog posts can help draw in traffic, especially when collaborating with other companies as you can leave a link at the end of the blog to tie back to your own website.
And lastly, video platforms are a good way to get tutorial and helper videos, they’re also usually good for advertisements and explaining what your business is and does.
Traffic that is paid is from advertisements. A lot of businesses purchase adverts and get them displayed on big company websites in order to direct people to their site.
For instance, Google adverts with pay per click, Facebook posts, YouTube video advertisements, and even spaces on various random websites with banners that can hold advertisements.
Editorial traffic comes from content that is published as a print or somewhere on the internet, it’s purpose it to help inform and even educate those that read it. But it is not created with the intention of selling something or acting as an advertisement.
However, one thing to be noted is that editorial is often confused with commercial as they’re very similar, but commercial content are adverts that look informative like an editorial.
This type of traffic is a reference to the users that come to your website through unpaid sources, or free traffic. For example, Google, Bing, and Yahoo are organic sources that can draw in visitors. Which is why it’s such a good idea to maximise your online presence via site rankings and keywords.
A direct traffic is when a user is directly sent to your website without clicking on any other links, this can be done by them entering the URL into their browser, using bookmarks to access the website, or even clicking on links within a message or email that have been sent by another person.
Using SEO can help you to improve the position that your website is in on different result pages, and the higher and better positions mean that your website is more likely to be seen by viewers.
SEO uses different methods in order to help improve your rank, it does this by:
• Finding and selecting specific keywords that has high search traffic
• Using links from sites of a high quality
• Measuring the number of results
• Making useful information and content for users and then making it optimised and better for search engines
Aside from publishing information, you can also edit factors on your website itself to help get more traffic directed towards it. Optimising the website with content on it can help you get the right keywords to boost it, for instance if you’re a tech website, using popular keywords by mentioning systems such as WordPress and cPanel can help optimise it.
You can also optimise off the site through the use of backlinks, which is just a link from one website to another. Using backlinks can really help build up the reputation of your site and traffic.
Additionally, it’s important you know how search engines work in order to maximise your sites ranking on different engines. The three processes are referred to as crawling, indexing, and ranking.
Search engines often try to find new websites and gather data from them, they then record that information and data and check on the content regularly to see if they’ve been updated in any way; essentially crawling through websites. They also go through links that have already been searched so that if any new links appear on that page or site, they’ll be able to find it.
Once a search engine has finished the crawling stage, it goes through a decision-making process to determine whether it should use the new content it has found. If the search engine decides to use the new page/site then it gets added to the index, this index is then filed and stored into a database and accessed when needed. However, if it chooses not to use the new page and index it into a database, it’s most likely because the new page is seen as a duplicate, is of poor quality, could not be crawled and recorded, and that it is lacking in links.
It's important that new sites and pages are added to the index as it is a very important factor within the ranking part of the process.
Once a search engine has crawled and indexed a new page or site, it gets ranked by a sorting system. Some of the main factors in the deciding result of the ranking is down to the: keywords mentioned in the title and information, the loading speed and whether the site is user friendly, and the reputation of the page/site for that specific topic of information it has.
Once it has been crawled, indexed, and ranked, the new page/site will then potentially receive more traffic inflow if it ranked highly, and if it hasn’t been ranked very well on a search engine, then it’s a great idea to think about optimising it a little bit more in order to get that traffic and visit count high.
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