SEO is one of the big abbreviations that is thrown around internet marketing circles. It’s the solution to your problems, the key to more exposure, and the one thing you need to conquer if you want to be a successful internet business. However, many people don’t really understand the concept of SEO, how it works, or what it even means—they just know it’s important and those big three letters stand for something important!
Search Engine Optimisation. That’s what SEO stands for. Burn those letters into your mind and remember them because we’ll be talking about SEO a lot during this article.
What is SEO?
SEO is essentially what it says. It doesn’t mean to optimise a search engine, however. It means to optimise your website to be picked up and displayed by a search engine. You might be thinking “Oh, so paid advertising?”. Nope. SEO refers to non-paid, natural ways to get your website noticed by a search engine. It focuses on trying to rank high up in the search engine results, improve traffic, up your rankings and increase the overall exposure you get.
SEO can be done by yourself, but a digital marketing agency is better prepared and equipped to deal with SEO intricacies than you are. It’s a complicated field and the methods of exposure change all the time, and you’ll find out why when you learn these simple principles.
It’s all about the keywords
When you search something in Google, you might be thinking of some keywords to search for. For example, if you’re looking for a cheap keyboard to replace your dying one, you would type “budget keyboards” or “cheap keyboard”. This will then return a lot of results with similar phrases to the ones you searched. This is because these websites are built around keywords. When you first type in something to Google, you’ll automatically have keywords and phrases suggested to you because it’s what is being searched, it’s what is popular, and it’s what gets results.
The meta description is important
When you search for something, there’s always a brief description about the website that is returned. There’s usually a short excerpt of the content itself with the keywords you typed in, or there’s a short summary of the content on the actual page. These can be automatically generated by Google, but they can also be customised by the site creator themselves. This is used mainly to summarise long articles and posts so that people click on them.
Images have tags as well
People use images in their websites to break up text and make something more pleasing. However, what many people don’t realise is that these images can contain tags which are similar to keywords. If you have a picture of a tomato, you can label it as “tomato” so that even if you don’t have the word tomato in your actual article, Google will still pick up your website as it is relevant to that keyword. This also makes it easier to pick up when people do Google Image searches and stumble upon your website.
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