In marketing, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) refers to the act of growing the number and quality of visitors to a website, using methods to improve rankings in search engine results, such as Google.

Studies have shown that sites which show up on the first page of Google get nearly 95% of clicks, and when a website appears on the top half of a search result page, it gets a higher click-through rate (CTR), more traffic, and ultimately more leads.

In SEO, organic or free search results positions refer to the places where a website appears that is not a paid ad or a feature snippet.

Feature snippets are infoboxes that can show up on the top of a Google search results page, like map listings, videos, Wikipedia info, and more.  With a strong SEO strategy, you can use these feature snippets to boost your business’ visibility as well.

How Does SEO Work?

Most modern search engines like Google rank their search results based upon several signals, including the relevancy and authority of the webpages it has crawled and included in its web index.

Because Google’s primary goal is to satisfy its users, it only shows web results that are helpful to them.

In total, Google uses over 200 signals to rank webpages. We don’t know which are the exact signals, but with SEO, we can make use of various technical and creative activities to influence and improve the signals that we’ve already known, and put our website higher up on Google.

Because Google wants to please its users, SEO, in essence, involves ensuring your website is accessible to readers, factual, and uses keywords that people typically use in the search engines.

On top of that, you should ideally over excellent user experience, with high-quality content your target audience will find useful.

Google has a highly-advanced algorithm that can evaluate the quality of its search results, which can categorise webpages into both high or low-quality content

How does a website become high quality? Google deems a site high quality only if it can clearly demonstrate three things – expertise, authority and trust (EAT).

Google also has a separate algorithm (known as ‘PageRank’) that calculates the popularity and authority of a page, based on the number of quality “inbound links”.

SEO can therefore also entail activities to help grow the number and quality of inbound links to your website from other websites, also called ‘link building’.

A website that has relevancy and repute placing hyperlinks on your website is a clear signal to Google that your website is trustworthy and exciting to your audience.

How To Do SEO

All SEO activities both technical and creative can be classified in to ‘Onsite SEO’ and ‘Offsite SEO’ practices.

While the terms are somewhat outdated, they are easily understood it splits practices into those that can be performed on a website, and those performed away from a website.

Both onsite and offsite SEO practices often require expertise from two or more practitioners as the skillsets need at a high level, are quite diverse – but fortunately, they can also be picked up.

The preferred option for most businesses would be to hire a professional SEO agency, or SEO consultant to assist in these areas.

Onsite SEO

Onsite SEO activities typically include the following–

• Keyword Research – Analyzing the types of words and frequency used by target customers to find a product or service, to understand their intent and expectations.
• Technical Auditing – Making sure Google’s indexing crawlers can access your website, properly meta-tagged, free from dead links or other user experience roadblocks.
• Onsite Optimisation – Tweaking the website structure, internal navigation layout, on-page content relevancy to help prioritise key areas and target relevant keywords
• User Experience – Ensuring content demonstrates expertise, authority and trust (EAT), is easy to digest, loads quickly, and ultimately offers the best possible user experience

This list only touches upon a small number of activities and is just part of the entire onsite SEO process.

Offsite SEO

Offsite SEO refers to actions that are done outside of a website that helps boost organic visibility.

This is commonly referred to as ‘link building’, where the objective is to build up the number of reputable links from other websites, as search engines use them as a scoring factor to rank on their search results.

Links coming from websites with more authority, popularity and relevancy will inherently pass on more value to another website, whereas an unknown, low-quality website that isn’t trusted by the search engines will send negative signals to another site.

Therefore, the quality of a link is one of the most important signals for SEO.

Some of the typical link building activities include:

• Content Marketing – Today, almost all reputable websites link to only to excellent content. So creating amazing content will help you to attract links. Example of great content can be  ‘how to’ guides, an interesting narration story, graphical charts, news or study with compelling data.
• Digital PR – PR (public relations) provides topics of interests for other websites to talk and link to a website. This can be, writing for external publications, expert interviews, quotes, product placement, internal newsflow, original research or studies and much more.
• Outreach & Promotion – This comprises of communicating with journalists, influencers, bloggers or webmasters so that they can offer coverage and place links of your site from their websites.

The number of reasons why any website might want to link to another is exhaustive, and not all of them will fit into the activities above.

This might include speaking at an industry event, helping out in your local community for a good cause, and other examples.

A general guideline to see if a link is valuable is to look into the quality of referral traffic (visitors that may click on the link to visit your site).

If the audience is unrelated and irrelevant, or the site doesn’t send any visitors, then it might not be worth the effort to pursue this link.

Also, note that various link schemes such as buying links, exchanging links excessively, or listing on low-quality directories and articles to manipulate rankings, are an explicit violation of Google’s guidelines, and they can penalise your website by delisting it from their search results.

The most ideal and sustainable approach to getting inbound links to a website is by earning them,

Give other websites genuine and compelling reasons to cite and link to your brand and content, and you’ll start to see your website start to generate more credibility and authority in Google’s eyes.

Where To Learn About SEO

There’s a ton of invaluable and free resources online that can teach you more on SEO. Some of the critical resources that are helpful includes:

• Google’s SEO Starter Guide
• Google Search Quality Rater Guidelines
• Moz’s SEO Learning Centre

Blogs such as Search Engine Land, Search Engine Journal and Marketing Land have a strong focus towards SEO. If you are interested in the subject of SEO, you should read them regularly to understand the latest updates in the SEO world.