Search Engine Optimisation 101 – How Does SEO Work?

For those new to the world of digital marketing, SEO or Organic Search, can be a difficult channel to understand. The term ‘organic’ search is used as an alternative for natural. Essentially in digital content terms it means ‘non-paid’. Organic search results shown within any search engine are the results that the engine you’re using has determined as the most relevant results for a given search query. Search engine results are determined via a complex algorithm based on all the websites and web pages from around the web that the search engine is aware of.

The process of conduction Search Engine Optimisation is essentially to ensure that your business website complies to all the factors considered by these algorithms in order to appear as the most relevant and valuable response to the search. These factors are plentiful and some of them can be particularly complex, but to help you get your head around the foundation principles of how sites are ranked using these factors, we can break them down into the three C’s.

Crawlability, Credibility & Content.

Crawl-ability – In a nutshell refers to how well your website is built and how easy it is for search engines to navigate and index. Search engine robots which ‘crawl’ the web continuously, are highly intelligent but they don’t read websites the way that we do, they’re machines taught to follow the language of the web. If your website has been designed without SEO in mind or has been coded poorly with errors or poor navigation, this can hinder search engines ability to read your site.

Producing a website which is coded to industry best standards and using an architecture designed to cater for the needs of SEO is a priority. Without a search engine friendly website in the first instance, there will be little else you can do to improve your chance of ranking.

Credibility – Link building is a term that has been used in digital marketing with reference to SEO for some time. It’s reputation in that time has endured a bit of a roller coaster. As well as looking at your business website in isolation, search engines like Google also look to see how your site is regarded in line with the rest of the world wide web. A link or reference of your website or business on 3 ^rd party websites helps search engines to establish a sites authority and stature within a given industry.

In the early days of SEO, acquiring the greatest number of links was the focus. It’s all a bit like an online popularity contest. Google and other search engines have since evolved and now the general perspective is quality & variety over quantity. Acquiring genuine links to your own website from 3 ^rd party sites is still a big part of an effective SEO strategy, though it’s something you need to read up on thoroughly or seek professional help on to ensure you’re approaching it correctly.

Content – You can have the most professionally, well-built website which functions perfectly and caters for the needs of search engine robots and a solid credibility/linking strategy but these two alone won’t do the job without highly relevant content. At the end of the day it’s the content of your site which will ultimately be what a search user is exposed to. If you want to rank for certain keywords on engines the likes of Google then you need to have content to offer its users which is as relevant and up to date as possible.

Content is again a case of focusing on quality but quantity certainly comes in to play as well. There is also a huge emphasis on ensuring your content is unique and not duplicated or plagiarised from elsewhere on the web. After all your website is likely going to be your businesses greatest asset, it’s something you should be continually investing in and growing. Taking care when producing your web text and adding a regularly updated blog are both key early considerations to get your content side of your SEO strategy underway.