SEO Basics: Part 1 – What is SEO?

This is the first part of our series of SEO articles. This is a basic introduction to SEO that you can apply to any website and help you to improve your rankings.

In the last few years SEO has hit the mainstream and is no longer thought of as the dark art that it once was! You don’t have to be a technical mastermind to achieve great rankings with your site it all just depends on these main factors:

Great content

Great content is original, useful to the reader, captivating and it should be related to the cause or aims of your web page. This could be writing a guide to your businesses products or software or simply keeping your audience updated with recent developments in your world. This will all help create the stickiness factor that will bring visitors back to your page. Don’t worry too much about keyword placement to detriment of the quality of your content but we will cover strategic keyword placement in future posts in the SEO category!

Backlinks

Backlinks are other websites linking back to yours, in theory this increases the importance of your webpage in the eyes of Google and the other search engines. This should be done ethically and not using spam techniques (such as leaving large amounts of unrelated comments on forum and blog pages), the Google search algorithm can detect this. A good way of gaining good quality links is promoting your website through social media, contacting related site and blog owners directly for a link swap or submitting your site to related directories.

Throughout an SEO campaign for a client we typically concentrate 80% of our efforts in gaining good quality backlinks using these methods. There is no set number of backlinks that you should aim to achieve per month but always choose quality over quantity, paid links may seem tempting but can harm your SEO efforts. Starting out with a few per month after just launching your site will help reduce what is known as the ‘Sandbox’ effect which is sometimes applied to new websites by Google which seriously limits the rankings that a new domain can achieve.

On-site optimisations

Weather you have a static web page or are using a database driven CMS such as WordPress or Drupal you can make the basic SEO optimisations through the use of plugins or if you have some HTML knowledge you can do this manually. The first place to start is by looking at your sites meta keyword and description tags – which are found in the <head> section of the HTML markup. Make sure you choose your keywords carefully and create an informative short description for your page to help the search engines as well as your users.

If you are unsure how to implement this, keep reading through our series as we will be covering on-site optimisation in greater depth in future articles.

Tools you will need

In order for you to monitor your site’s Google rankings and traffic reports you will need to have your site registered and verified with Google Analytics and Google Webmaster tools. Analytics will display detailed statistics on your sites traffic and is important for monitoring inbound search traffic. You can also generate extensive reports, which is important so that you and your team can monitor your sites progress. Webmaster tools will provide you with keyword ranking reports and will display your search impressions (the amount of time your site has shown up in searches) as well as providing suggestions with regards to HTML tags and duplicate content.

Wherever you are with your SEO campaign, it is important to remember that it will take time to reach your goals and be prepared for the high and low points of search engine optimisation but making small changes frequently really is the key. There are many other techniques applied by professionals to compliment these basics

Vibrocentric Web Services provide results driven Search Engine Optimisation services, if you are interested in us putting a campaign together for you give us a call on 0844 822 2612 or email seo@vibrocentric.co.uk and a consultant will contact you immediately. We are on hand all day everyday to help you reduce your online marketing costs and maximise the potential of your website.