An Introduction to SEO

SEO Tips for Beginners

This is the first part of our series and is a general introduction to Search Engine Optimisation. It covers the initial basics of how the SEO process works and some tips for beginners if you are looking to have a go at SEO yourself.

SEO is made up of two key components; on-page and off-page optimisation. This blog will focus on the basics of on-page optimisation.

If you have paid for a website to represent your business online then you want it to receive as much traffic as possible. Most design agencies have good design skills but they haven’t all got the search engine knowledge or experience to get the SEO basics right from the beginning. SEO is often an afterthought, which makes it difficult to optimise once your site has gone live. If this is the case for your website, then what can you do about it?

Keywords Research – This is the basis for any SEO campaign. By undertaking keyword research, you gain an insight into your business sector and an understanding of what search terms are popular with your customers.

Site Structure – The keyword research should drive the thought process for planning your website structure. Make sure you include landing pages for the post popular search phrases, this will improve the relationship between webpage and keyword and give you a much better chance of being ranked in the search engines.

Code Structure – Search engines don’t read websites like visitors do. The search engine reads the code that makes the web browsers display the website as we see it. It is important that your website code is as optimised as possible, so that you make it easy for search engines to read the code behind the pages. This includes your content too, as structured content with the correct heading sequences make your content much easier for search engines to understand.

Optimising your Images – Search engines now place huge significance on page load speed times, so it is important that you optimise your site files to be as small as possible.

Create a Google Account – By creating a Google account with your email address, you can have access to Google Webmaster Tools. This will give you an insight into how your site is performing in the search engines, how many sites link to yours, your most popular keywords plus much more. It also allows you to submit an XML sitemap so you can tell Google about all the pages on your site, their change frequency and priority.

Hopefully this will give you an understanding of the very basics of SEO. In our next blog we are going to be talking about off-site SEO techniques, then moving on to more advanced techniques such as PageRank sculpting, duplicate content analysis, SEO for eCommerce, site taxonomy and category optimisation.