SEO – what does it mean?
The digital advertising world is a world filled with acronyms, from SEO, SEM, SEA, SERP, PPC and plenty more. Now we can hear you’re probably thinking WTF? (wait there’s further?), so what do they all mean and how are important are they for your business when trying to expand your digital reach?
In this article we are going to break the SEO component down (search engine optimisation for those playing along at home). Firstly SEO is part of a bigger picture, combined with SEA (search engine advertising) that encompasses pay per click (PPC) and banner advertising that all fit under the more commonly known search engine marketing (SEM) and all aim to increase website traffic, enquiries and ideally sales.
We know Rome wasn’t built in a day and neither will your website’s organic growth build in a day via SEO methods. Consider the billions of web pages, Google and other search engines must crawl through to return results based on your search. Now consider if your website doesn’t have many of the key fundamentals to assist in optimising the search, how can these search engines find you on the first page, let alone at all?
While the techniques of SEO are forever evolving and updating based on the recent algorithm updates, it is imperative to ensure your website is optimised. Once this has occurred you are at least creating a stronger environment so search engines can find your site content and achieve a better result on the SERP (search engine results page). The following 5 simple steps should be adopted:
- Ensure your website is updated regularly. Monthly or quarterly at worst. If you are only updating your website once or twice a year, your are missing out on traffic driven by search engines. These search engines thrive on fresh, updated and relevant content. Remember to remove outdated items, products, services, prices, contact details and other information as site visitors seek current information.
- Set up social media networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Linkdin and Google plus – this also provides Google authorship. Even if you don’t plan on updating these that regularly, it is certainly another way for your business to be found on line.
- Good Real Estate equals location, location, location. Good websites equals content, content, content. Content is really is king and the more information your site has the better chance it has to match topical and relevant searches within search engines.
- Ensure your content is structured and laid out correctly, eg. don’t cram everything onto one page – it’s too confusing and search engines want to return detailed, topical information on a search not generic non related information.