What is SEO?
SEO stands for ‘Search Engine Optimisation’.
SEO is the process of making calculated changes to a website’s design (i.e: layout design, content design, site performance etc.) in order to increase your website’s chance of becoming a prime recommendation for specific keywords or key-phrases relevant to your target audience.
If I owned a business which manufactures lightweight titanium Mountain bike parts in the U.K, for example, I may want to appear on the first page of Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) for phrases like “Titanium bike wheels UK”, “Lightweight bike parts” or “lightweight bike forks”.
Generally speaking, though, the more generic a search term is, the more fierce the competition will be for search rankings within it and the harder it will be to reach people using that criteria.
What factors lead to success in SEO?
Modern Search Engines have advanced rapidly in the last decade in order to accomodate to the increased demands of their users to find relevant information quickly, as well as to adapt to the sheer volume of websites available on the internet today.
Today, matching for keywords in a specific search query is simply the tip of the metaphorical iceberg, with Search engines now considering a huge range of holistic factors in their calculations, from text colour contrasts to web page performance benchmarks. Effective SEO management for such advanced search algorithms involves the consideration of a wide range of holistic factors which affect search positioning.
From humble beginnings within the recesses as a Stanford University project
Search Engine Optimisation can be a cause of overwhelm for even the most technology users.
Given how many aspects of a website’s implementation can affect it’s usefulness, SEO incorporates a huge umbrella of necessary concerns, including:
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How the site is structured at the code level.
- Do the headings within the site follow a logical ordering pattern?
- Are visual elements within a page appropriately marked up with descriptive suppporting text?
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How relevant is the content on your website in relation to key search terms or phrases that consumers use in order to find similar products?
- If you sell ethically-manufactured products for the bathroom (as does an existing client),
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Whether or not items such as image
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How accessible the website code is for disabled users and assistive technologies
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How fast the website loads
As you may have gathered, in a general sense modern SEO depends significantly upon the overall functioning of a website or ‘site health’.
based upon key phrases within the main body of a webpage’s text
The practise of Search Engine Optimisation is a melding of a wide range of scientific and technological disciples, primarily:
- Statistics - inspecting website analytics and knowing how to manipulate data in order to identify user behaviour on a site is essential to understanding customer journies and preventing lost sales
- Website Engineering - Search Engine algorithms are constantly evolving, and are often highly sensitive to minute details within the code of a Web Page that could be easily overlooked by an inexperienced user. As a result, SEO practicioners must develop a foundational understanding of how in the implementation of a page. segements of your website content which is only visible in the original ‘source code’ of the Web Page
Starting from humble beginnings , Search Engine Marketing
The industry space of SEO is full of complex turns of phrase