Search engine optimisation (SEO) has in recent years become a fundamental part of countless business’ marketing strategy. There are a great deal of businesses whose entire business model relies on their SEO and organic search positioning and performance.
However, whilst almost every business up and down the country needs a comprehensive SEO strategy many simply do not know where to actually start. This can prove to be difficult though as not knowing where to start often leads to further problems in the implementation of an effective SEO strategy.
Your Industry and Company
Before you even begin to consider what the details o f the strategy required will be, it is crucial to take your industry into account as practices in SEO vary to some extent from industry to industry. For example, if a company works in financial planning and wealth planning, their industry will differ from for example a payday loans provider.
Ensuring Search Engines Understand
Critically, and before any new content or links can be worked on, a website needs to be made ‘friendly’ towards search engines and their basic and then more complex rankings criteria. For example, in the case of Google, heavy emphasis is placed by their algorithm on relevancy and originality of content. On a more basic level though, the content needs to be offered up to the search engine accordingly.
‘Crawling’ of a website refers to the reading and parsing of the site in question by the appropriate search engine. There are some basic rules and practices that all sites should follow here:
- Ensure none of the code making up the website are ‘hidden’
- Meta data; comprising titles and descriptions are a fundamental SEO factor that provide the initial details for search engines and these snippets of data should always be optimised
- URL structures for all pages should be relevant, natural and clean to ensure it is clear to search engines and users alike, what the page content entails
Focusing on Content and Users
As well as what most would term the ‘technical SEO,’ there are many other elements that make up the puzzle that is a fully optimised website. Principally, once the site is set up to be able to properly crawled by search engines, what is crawled becomes more and more important. There are numerous considerations here:
- Do not write content for the sake of it; each page and content piece should have a function and a clear purpose. No search engine likes pointless, thin content
- Websites should be fully optimised for mobile and tablet devices. With Google in particular operating a ‘mobile-first’ ranking algorithm, ensuring a site scales properly for mobile devices and can be properly interacted with by these devices is increasingly important
- Website speed is key. Ultimately, a slow website is more likely to end up causing users to leave due to impatience and an inability to properly access what they are in fact looking for and wishing to interact with