What is SEO? A Beginner's Guide

Our content team run a series of ongoing SEO campaigns for clients here at Parallax, but when it comes to talking to business owners who are not engaging with SEO or even friends and family, people can often draw a blank face.

So what is SEO?

SEO stands for search engine optimisation. In its original sense SEO is a form of digital marketing to help a website rank on search engines. The higher the website ranks, the more traffic it will receive from people making searches using Google, Bing and Yahoo.

Once your website is ranking for a heavily searched keyword or keyphrase, the potential to create a viable business purely from your website is huge, especially if your business’ revenue stream is focused on online sales. The returns can be very profitable. SEO is used by many businesses who don’t have an e-commerce platform too. This may be to generate leads from users filling in a contact form or simply directing them to pick up the phone. However, SEO is an ongoing commitment and requires serious time and investment.

SEO has Evolved

Today SEO has greatly evolved from what was formerly known as a dark art and has shaken the spammy reputation it once had. Webmasters formerly would buy links and spam other websites with links to their own website which would move them up the search engine results pages. This doesn’t work anymore – in fact it has seen many websites removed from Google permanently.

SEO is positioning a website on Google to win traffic and business leads with the view to increase conversions and sales. It has evolved to become a byproduct of content marketing or what many refer to as ‘online PR’. Google’s search algorithm is regularly updated and is the most commonly used search engine with Bing, Yahoo and other smaller search engines following in its wake.

But how does Google rank websites? There are thousands of businesses vying for a top spot for competitive search queries; this is where SEO (or content marketing) today plays a key role.

For businesses doing it right, SEO can be very lucrative. For those not engaging with SEO, the pitfalls can be significant. As we move further into the digital era online sales and business leads are becoming the main method of customer purchases.

So what are the ins and outs of SEO?

SEO can be broken down into two major areas: on site SEO – everything to do with the technical initiatives you can make with your own website, and off site SEO – the content marketing and online PR tricks that can help position your website high on Google.

Here at Parallax we’ve put together a short list for both on and off site SEO techniques for beginners approaching the SEO world. These five tips for on and off site SEO will help you get the basics right.

Five Basic On site SEO Tips

On site SEO is essential. It lays the foundations for the ongoing SEO efforts you will be making for your website. Businesses must ensure that their on site SEO practices are on point.

Keywords

Selecting the right keywords to target and how to use them across your website is essential. Google provides data on volume for all keywords so you can ensure you’re on the right path.

Content

Build up your on site content around the keywords you aim to target, but avoid keyword stuffing. Overuse of words can be detrimental. Fresh and regular content is key for assisting Google in seeing your website as relevant. Content must be unique – Google penalises websites with duplicate content.

Page Titles and URLs

Every page you create will have a page title and URL. Optimise these with keywords to give Google the best chance of indexing and ranking your pages.

H. Refs

Having headings on pages are crucial. Again, include (where relevant) targeted keywords and make sure they link to relevant pages. The internal linking – especially through h.refs or h.tags shouldn’t be ignored.

You can explore in greater detail the ins and outs of on site SEO here.

Five Basic Off site SEO Tips

Once you’ve laid the foundations with your on site SEO, it’s time to tackle off site SEO. This is all of the work you do away from your website and is predominantly focussed on generating links pointing back to your website.

Links

Links can be seen as Google’s currency. The more (authoritative) links pointing back to you, the higher the regard Google will view your website with. A link is a recommendation.

Content

Why would people link to me? This comes down to providing value. Is there something unique and special about your website or on a particular page of your website that people feel inclined to link to? Our content marketing article talks more about this.

Interactive

Create insightful and engaging content. Interactive pieces such as this drink driving piece and this great mistakes through human errors infographic have found their way onto some very influential websites gaining some valuable links.

Outreach

Guest articles and blog posts on relevant industry websites are a big winner as far as off site SEO goes. This, just like creating interactive content, is very time consuming but the results are worth it. Approach editors and pitch some ideas to them, after all they need content for their website and will usually happily provide at least one link back to your website in return.

Get Social

Give Google as many signals as you can. As well as links from other websites make sure you’re on Facebook, Twitter and Google+ at a bare minimum (obviously depending on your business whether you’re a B2B or B2B company). Talk to people and they will respond. Social conversation, shares, and RTs are all part of the rich off site SEO melting pot that Google’s algorithm requires.

You can read more about off site SEO and content marketing here.

Takeaways

Invest time in getting a solid foundation laid with your on site SEO efforts. Getting this right will really help you down the line once you begin link building and content marketing. When you’re ready to start approaching online editors, make sure you are offering them something of genuine interest and value that will be useful for their readers.

Hopefully you’ve found these tips useful – we’d love to know if you’ve recently started up an SEO campaign and are seeing some early results.

We’re often blogging and will be sharing more insights to digital marketing on our blog with some more in depth information too. You can drop us a tweet too with any other top 5 on site and off site SEO tips that you think should have made the cut.