Building an online presence starts with the creation of a website. Ensuring users find that website requires placement on search engines such as Google and Bing. Businesses can secure a search presence through advertising or optimisation. While both methods have the same goal – driving more traffic by making it easier for users to find your website, they involve very different processes.
Definition: Search Engine Optimisation
Search Engine Optimisation is the process of improving a website’s organic search presence. A number of activities contribute towards this process, and the methodology evolves as search algorithms change, but the core set of activities always includes technical changes to facilitate search indexing, optimising all content formats, and building links to improve perceived authority.
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Technical Website Optimisation
Modern websites use a range of technologies such as AJAX and JavaScript to deliver an interactive user experience. E-commerce sites are built on large databases to present a range of products to visitors. Coding these interactive sites and databases the wrong way can create barriers for search engine bots crawling and indexing the content. When optimising a website, experts should consider all technical aspects, ensuring search bots can access and understand the content on all pages.
Link Building
Since the very beginning, Google has considered inbound links from authoritative external website to be a very important ranking factor. This hasn’t changed over the years, though Google has become a lot better at identifying link quality and context. For marketers, that means building links is still important, but more challenging than ever.
Content SEO
The actual content on a page is obviously a very important factor all search engines consider when ranking sites. Therefore, no search engine optimisation process is complete without a thorough audit and review of all formats of content – text, images, and video – on every page of the website. These audits should typically consider placement, frequency, and context of keywords, their close variants, and their synonyms on the page
Advice for Webmasters & Marketers
SEO requires careful planning and a site-wide implementation strategy. Webmasters, copy writers, marketers, and PR teams should jointly plan for an initial review and improvement phase, followed by at least 2 years of activity, which should include:
- Strategic direction for the website
- On-page content optimisation
- Regular addition of fresh content
- Link bait creation and outreach to earn fresh links
- Social media marketing and advertising campaigns to complement organic search activities.
