SEO - Where Do I Start?
Search engine optimisation (SEO) - The process of impacting the ranking of a website on a search engine's results for specific keywords to gain organic visibility
Every search engine combined receives over 6.5 billion searches a day with Google contributing around 4.5 billion of the searches. The benefits of a good SEO are huge, from your sites ranking within keyword searches to increasing the possibility of conversion.
As a consequence, developing a good SEO involves many obstacles, the largest being how a search engines rank websites is unknown to everyone. For example, Google uses an algorithm involving over 200 factors to determine the ranking of websites for a specific search yet Google will never release information on any of the factors. But through persistent testing, web designers have been able to identify some factors to include into your website and research.
Market knowledge
You must know your target market, including understanding the keywords potential visitors search. You can take advantage of online software's which can provide a breakdown on the volume of traffic for keywords and produce a difficulty scale to beat competitors for those keyword search results. Make sure you're targeting the correct keywords.
Good user experience
Create a good user experience in every aspect of the user's process. This will include the quality of your site (content, links, images and more and processes. If you ensure that every user has a positive experience and comes away with new knowledge, search engines will mark this as a positive aspect of your website and rank you higher.
Site Speed
The time a site takes to load and during the user's interaction. Make sure your website is running at optimal speed. As slower sites will rank lower following research from Google which produced a positive correlation between the duration of time for a site to load and users who do not wait. A small alteration to your websites structure, the volume of content and optimisation of images will affect site speed dramatically.
Keyword usage
The volume of keywords is a controversial subject. Research1 by some web design experts have identified that the volume of a keyword in a website's text affects ranking. The research1 showed that a keyword used approximately 2.4% on a web page is most effective and also highlighted that you can also incorporate 1.5% similar works to your keywords to maximise your SEO (Visually presented below). Whereas other web designers believe keyword volume does not have any correlation to SEO and the focus should be on the quality of content. Nevertheless, utilising both opinions can be incorporated into any content for cover both possibilities to enhance your SEO.
You may be reading this as you're new to SEO and discovering it is a complex and fast-changing environment or brushing up on your knowledge. The first step is to identify whether your website represents you and once it ranks high, will it have a high conversion rate. Following achieving this step, you can focus on your SEO.
References
1 - https://www.smartinsights.com/search-engine-marketing/search-engine-statistics/
