How does SEO work?

Chances are, you’ve heard the buzz about SEO marketing and search engine algorithms, but perhaps you don’t really know what that means in practice or how it works. We hope this article will explain a little bit more about how SEO works. Before we go into detail, it’s worth giving a very short summary: SEO is the practice of making sure your site’s content and experience is optimised, boosting your exposure to those using search engines. It helps to rank your page in Google’s search index, for example.

How do search engines work?

Google and other search engines use complicated formulas based on mathematic algorithms. These search through different websites and score them, to work out which sites they should show at the top of their list. They measure a variety of factors, including:

• number of websites linking to your site
• people who use and trust your website; and
• the quality of your website. The higher your score, the higher you will feature on their list of available websites. These are just a few examples of how search engines measure the value of your website, but SEO means ticking as many boxes as possible.

What are the most important site qualities for search engine optimisation?

The most important qualities for your site, from a search engine perspective, are trust, authority and quality.

Quality means good content, for example having unique product descriptions, interesting articles or blog posts, extra information, and detailed explanations of your products or services. Creating relationships with others who have credible sites is another way to boost your credibility and the quality of your site from the perspective of the search engines. Your job is to show the search engines that your website, products and/or services are better than other comparable websites available.

The best way to develop trust is to ensure that your reviews are showing the credibility of your business. The algorithms are looking to promote websites who have happy visitors and customers. Having other sites and brands promote your website allows you to draw on their credibility and trust with search engines. Authoritative websites promoting your site gives you a bit of a piggy-back. Authority comes from being popular. Search engines recognise popularity via social network presence, purchasing records, links from other sites, and your fan base more generally.

How do I improve my SEO ranking?

One of the most popular ways to improve search engine optimisation for your site is keywords. This involves creating content which uses words relevant to your industry. However, this isn’t the easiest or best way to boost your site’s rankings. Some of the best ways to improve your site’s visibility on search engines are:

• Usability: how easy is it for users to make use of your website? Can they find the information they need easily?
• Efficiency: how quickly are users able to get what they want via your website? If they can’t get what they want, and so leave your site quickly, then this will impact your ratings.
• Error free navigation: if consumers come onto your website to find ‘page not found’ links or other errors, this suggests that your site doesn’t offer a good user experience, and it isn’t likely to be promoted.
• Page load speed: quicker loading means a better experience for users. Try measuring your speed using a provider such as Pingdom.

These are just some of the ways in which you can improve your site’s rankings using SEO. Hopefully this article has helped you to learn a bit more about optimisation. To find out more, contact us at iprogress today.

Good luck with the changes you make and in boosting your site’s rankings!