What is SEO?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a strategic process aimed at enhancing a website's visibility and ranking on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) through organic (non-paid) search results. Organic search results are pages that have ranked high due to effective SEO, and not through paid advertisements.
To help increase your site visibility, think about your users and what keywords or queries they will enter when searching for your site. Search Engines work by scouring through content via Crawling & Indexing to determine search results that will help with the users' queries and ranking them in order of relevance. SEO involves various techniques and practices designed to improve the likelihood that search engines, like Google, Bing, or Yahoo, will rank a website highly in response to relevant user queries.
Key components of SEO include:
- Keyword Research - Identifying words and phrases users enter into search engines that are relevant to your content.
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On-Page SEO - Maximising individual web pages to rank higher and earn more relevant traffic in search engines. This includes content creation, use of keywords, meta tags, headers, image alt text, and URL structure.
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Technical SEO: Ensuring that a website meets the technical requirements of search engines with the goal of improved organic rankings. This includes site speed, mobile-friendliness, indexing, crawlability, site architecture, and security (HTTPS).
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Off-Page SEO: Actions taken outside of your website to impact your rankings within SERPs. This is primarily driven by backlinks (links from other websites that point back to your site).
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Content SEO: Creating high-quality, relevant content that answers users' queries and provides a good user experience. This involves regular updates and refreshes of content.
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User Experience (UX): Improving site usability, navigation, and overall user satisfaction.