Understanding Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

You may have come across the term Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) while looking for digital marketing tips and services. So what exactly is Search Engine Optimisation? How does it work? Here’s a definitive guide to help you understand SEO services in Sydney, so you can make it an integral part of your business.

Search Engine Optimisation

Popularly known as SEO, it is one of the most important digital marketing channels that help you gain a better ranking on the search engine results page. On average, two out of three customers will use search engines to find a product/service. Imagine your website coming as one of the three top links in the results page. Most people don’t go beyond the first page of results and many only consider the first couple of links. In such a competing environment, SEO can help you gain traffic, leads and conversions for unprecedented profit growth.

Search engines and how SEO affects them

Search engines such as Google and Bing can crawl through websites and scan them for the content. When a user searches for a specific product/service, the search keywords are matched to all the websites on the internet. If your business matches the keywords, it will present your website as a part of the results page.

While doing so, the search engine considers:

• How well the content on the website is presented

• The use of relevant keywords and phrases

• The user-friendliness of the site’s navigation and design

• Other places on the internet that have a follow link to your website

The idea of using SEO is simple. Use rich content that provides rich information to the target audience and engage more potential customers. We recommend involving digital agencies such as Blurn Australia for digital marketing to get the best results and significant profit.

Breaking it down

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) requires tweaking of several factors associated with your website. Even though the search engine algorithms keep changing, these factors are the basis for getting the best search engine results page (SERP) rankings.

1. Content

There is nothing as important as content when it comes to attracting potential customers. Content is what keeps your website visitors stay longer, check your products/services, purchase or hire your business and eventually become loyal to your brand.

Understand that your content should be rich in information and have data that will help the visitor in some way. The biggest factor to consider is keywords. Find out all the keywords that a customer might use to search for your business. Using these keywords and phrases appropriately in your copy can serve as a major boost to your ranking.

Content covers a lot of different types that are necessary for fine-tuning your website. The types of content you should focus on are:

• Blog posts and articles: Write regular blogs that do not promote your products/services but also provide updates, news, tips and other relevant information of your industry. Articles on other websites can help you gain more followers from their websites.

• Social Media: Yes, social media copies and content are important to define your brand. Another advantage of social media is to get a lot of traffic from these channels from followers.

• Guides and Tutorials: When you offer relevant information to your visitors with simple guides and how-to tutorials, they will definitely subscribe to your brand. These guides and tutorials can also help boost your SERP if the content is relevant and popular.

• Videos and Podcasts: Videos are becoming more and more popular. Many users also go to YouTube to look for certain information. Creating videos related to your business can boost your rankings. Similarly, podcasts are getting popular day-by-day. An expert opinion or interview with someone who knows your business will also help boost the ranking.

• Visual media: Search engines crawl through relevant words, phrases and also the alt tags for visual media on your page. This can help search engines recognise your website’s relevance and increase your ranking further.

Apart from creating brand new content, you can also keep updating your older posts with newer news and rewrite them to match the current writing trends.

2. On-page optimisation

On-page SEO is the various elements that you require to edit and enhance to get best search engine rankings. These factors do include the written content as mentioned above but also involves a lot of editing in the site’s HTML to boost your SERP.

Few factors that fall under the on-page SEO to help improve search engine rankings are:

• Title Tag: The title tag on every page of your website is a description of what it includes. The character limit for the title tag is 70 or less. It should ideally include the primary keyword and your business name and product/service.

• Headings and Sub-headings: The H1, H2 and H3 tags used in your document cannot just make your content easier to read but also significantly improves your SEO. These tags should include targeted keywords to help search engines match relevant searches with your content.

• Meta Description: This is a brief description of your business that includes short details of your products/services. The Meta Description should include relevant keywords to help search engines crawl better and your visitors to get a quick glance at your business.

• Image Name and ALT Tags: Images on your website, blogs and articles should have keywords and phrases in the ALT tags. This helps in search engines to index them for image searches.

• Internal Links: Creating internal links that take the users to other content on your website will also benefit your SERP. Search engines consider these relevant links as important. So creating call-to-actions and links to blogs or product/service page really help.

• Sitemap: Once you have the navigation of the website ready, you can submit the sitemap to search engines to let it understand the content and website better.

• Mobile-Friendly: Many search engines today focus on responsiveness of the website. A mobile-friendly website with easy navigation and user experience is highly valued for SEO.

If you are trying to perform SEO for your website on your own, be aware that any over-optimisation by inserting too many keywords and phrases will result in a penalty. Google can be really strict while considering keywords. Keep your content focused on providing information instead and add the keywords naturally to make them a part of it.

The best way to avoid such issues is to hire the services of a professional SEO service such as Blurn. It will not only avoid penalties but also prove beneficial for your page’s overall ranking.

3. Off-page optimisation

Off-page SEO factors are those that impact your search engine ranking but cannot be directly controlled over by you. But it doesn’t mean that you cannot improve them to get a better ranking. The factors that are associated with off-page SEO are:

• Trustworthiness: A website’s ranking can really tank if the search engine deems it illegitimate. You need to gain the trust of search engines and your users by building quality backlinks from other relevant websites that have a better ranking.

• Social Media Popularity: Although SEO is not directly linked with social media accounts, the number of likes, comments and shares you generate can help your search engine ranking. Quality content that is shared by users and also by top influencers can positively impact your SEO.

The best way to work on these factors is to have tie-ups with top websites with higher ratings to publish blogs and articles. Also, you can invest in social media marketing to indirectly get better SEO. Again, a top agency such as Blurn is recommended to help you with these factors since they have the experience, contacts and the technology to get the maximum profits out of off-page SEO.

Don’ts to avoid the negative impact of SEO

Yes, you read it right. There are chances that your SEO is generating the wrong results for your page’s ranking. The following are a few main factors you should avoid to ensure your SEO plan doesn’t negatively impact your rankings and get you penalised.

• Never use shortcuts in SEO strategy such as spamming the website with keywords

• Avoid using too many keywords in the content, especially if they don’t make any sense in the flow of words

• Don’t use link farming offered by several websites who don’t have a good reputation

• Stay away from agencies that promise SEO and top-ranking quickly

You can also hire a digital marketing agency such as Blurn, which has a reputation and clientele that has benefited from their services. Getting a quick ranking using Black Hat SEO techniques is easy, but eventually gets your site penalised. And that may take a long time to come back. So be patient and ensure you cover every aspect of the tips we have provided.

The best way would be to go back to your website, go through every page and compare it with the points we have mentioned. And If you plan to get a digital marketing agency on board, you now have an understanding of what SEO can do for you.

Blurn.com Australia,

50 Murray St,

Sydney NSW 2000,

Australia.

is a leading profit-focused Digital Marketing Agency offering a wide range of digital marketing services, including:

Digital Marketing Consultation, Search Engine Optimisation, Web Design, Paid Search(SEM/PPC), Social Media Marketing, Programmatic RTB display Marketing, Direct Display Marketing, Video Marketing, Email and SMS Marketing, Marketing Automation & CRM, Remarketing, Creative Design

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