A beginner’s guide to SEO

As a business owner today, it’s pretty hard to escape the term SEO or to avoid the phrase Search Engine Optimisation. It’s no surprise that, as the internet’s become more than just a mere tool for business, and developed into the marketplaces and communication channels that business takes place in, the previously underground technical strategies involved in web design and digital marketing have been pulled into the mainstream. As the internet’s evolved, SEO has taken a central role in business. 

 You can be forgiven, however, for still not fully understanding what SEO actually is. It is a largely technical process, after all, and one that’s jam-packed with jargon that, at times, can seem impenetrable. But one thing that search engine optimisation is not, is impossible to understand. It isn’t wichcraft, it isn’t rocket science, and you don’t need a PHD to do it. In this quick, beginner’s guide to SEO, we hope to give you all the information you need to get your head around search engine optimisation and to give you an introduction to the resources that will help you get started on an SEO strategy that will benefit your business.

How do search engines work?

 When the internet was first invented, these algorithms simply returned webpages with the highest volume of the searched words - or keywords. As the internet became more popular, the algorithms were increasingly exploited and search engines have needed to continually update their rules for ranking websites to make sure their users are getting the highest quality results. This has meant that certain techniques that used to work to improve a website’s ranking, will now actually result in your site being penalised by a search engine. For example, overly using keywords is now seen as a detrimental factor and a much wider range of SEO practices should be employed to ensure a high ranking.

What do search engines use to rank your page?

While most of the big search engines - like Google, Bing and Yahoo - keep the exact workings of their algorithm a closely guarded secret, they do all give best practice advice. And, combined with independent research available in blogs and on news sites, a lot of the factors that Search Engines use to rank your page can be easily researched.

 A search engine’s algorithm consists of hundreds of different known components, far too many to mention in this guide. However, these components can be broken down into four main groups: technical SEO, user experience, content related SEO, and off-page SEO.

Technical SEO includes things like the speed at which a page loads in a user’s browser, or how well it works on mobile devices and smartphones.

User experience would include ranking signals like the duration a user spends on a page before bouncing back to the search engine results.

Content can make or break a website. Search engines will use a number of factors to determine whether the content on a site is high quality, like the length and the breadth of information included within it.

Off-Page SEO refers to the techniques implemented outside of your website that impact your site's ranking. This generally involves improving the perceived authority of your website by encouraging other webpages to hyperlink back to your site. This is known as back linking. To find out more about it, take a look at the Moz’s SEO Resource Centre in the tools and resources below.