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What is SEO?

The ultimate aim of SEO is to get your website to rank number one on chosen search engines for an identified search term your potential customers use to find your services or products.

What is SEO?

SEO isn’t as complex as some SEO companies would like you to believe, although it does take a lot of time and dedication to run an SEO improvement plan.

SEO is a large topic, but in this article I will try to briefly explain what SEO is, so you can attempt to gain some understanding of the topic and can then make decisions on the future SEO for your website, whether you hire a large SEO company or contact us for help.

What are Organic search results?

So what is SEO in simple terms? Search Engine Optimisation, otherwise known as SEO, is the process of improving a websites ranking in the “organic” search results in search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo. Organic search results are listings on search engine results pages that appear because of their relevance to the search term, and are not adverts or a result of a Pay Per Click campaign.

The ultimate aim of SEO is to get your website to rank number one on chosen search engines, for an identified search term your potential customers use to find your services or products. The higher your listing in the search engines the more traffic your website should receive and the more potential customers you will engage.

If there was ever an industry that was little understood by business owners, website owners and the public as a whole, it’s SEO.

SEO takes time!

Website owners usually make the following presumptions:

  • They get a website and will miraculously appear on search engine listings.
  • They will be somewhere on the first, second or third page instantly.
  • When the above doesn’t happen they assume it’s the “web developers” fault.
  • They then presume it’s easy to fix in a matter of days by paying someone and they will be in the number 1 position, for any keyword phase they choose, by next week.

All of those assumptions are wrong. Absolutely wrong.

How does SEO work?

Getting to the top spot of a search engine like Google is hard and takes time and effort. Of course some search terms are less competitive than others. The competitiveness of the search term depends on the product, service and market.

The key to SEO is to identify keyword phrases that your customers search for but that have low competition in the search engines, from other websites and thus it’s an easier task to get your site to list number 1.

What are Search Engine Spiders?

A search engine spider is software which “crawls” the world wide web to create a huge map of all websites and their pages. Spiders are automated and are constantly looking for new sites and crawling existing sites for new content. While crawling all these sites the spider analyses the content of the website and all it’s pages, to identify what the page and website is about.

The data search engine spiders gather is used to establish relevancy to the search term and the authority of the website in relation to the search term.

What is Search Engine Authority and Relevance?

It isn’t just random luck when a website appears in the number one spot or on the first page of a search engine such as Google. When you type a search term into a search engine and a page appears with a list of links for relevant websites, a complex algorithm has been at work to show you the most relevant pages to your search. Search engines use the data spiders (or web crawlers) gather and measure it against the algorithm.

Algorithms determine relevance by analysing page content in relation to the search query, and it measures domain authority mostly on the number and quality of links a page has. You could say links are like votes and an indication of quality and although not the only method of determining quality,  links remain Google’s favoured metric. The Google algorithm is carefully created, tested and frequently changing to add improvements in order to support billions of internet searches each month. Algorithms are the formulas that take your questions (search term) and turn them into answers (the search result).

For a typical query, there are thousands, if not millions, of webpages with helpful information. Google’s algorithms contain over 200 unique signals that make it possible to guess what you might really be looking for. These signals include things like the keywords in the content, the how frequently the site is updated, your city, how socially active you are on pages such as Facebook, when the website and page was published, whether the site contains pictures and videos and so on.

In simple terms SEO involves writing pages that use keywords, words people use in searches, and securing links from other pages to show how important your page is compared to others. Links are votes and votes get you elected to page 1…..it’s that simple.

We hope this post has helped you understand the basics of SEO. Make sure you check out our other related posts linked below.

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Abi Andrews is a trustworthy SEO Consultant in Leeds. Get in touch now for FREE SEO advice and a FREE SEO report on your website. PHONE: (0113) 279 7731

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