What is SEO?
In simple terms, Search Engine Optimisation is a series of techniques used by marketing guys and gals to increase traffic to a website, bumping up the ranking of a site on Google, for the most part, based on web content! Sounds easy, right?
What’s Spiderman got to do with it?
You’ve got a website, but it ain’t no good if nobody can find where you’re hiding. So Google deploys something called ‘spiders’— it started with just 4 back in the day—and these little web crawlers scan and navigate around the web indexing everything like the librarians of the Internet.
When a web crawler lands on your site, it makes note of where you’re located and collects all of the links, popping them in a file and taking them back to their HQ. They then communicate with the Algorithm—fancy web talk for answering machine—yes, the algorithms are responsible for answering those queries we put into the search bar? These algorithms are based on hundreds of parameters like: how fresh is your content; where are you based on Earth; how many people have visited your page in the last while, and a whole pile more, some of which are known only to Google.
Black Hat SEO
These are underhanded methods of optimising a website, more than likely, resulting in a website being penalized:
Using the same colour font for body text and background i.e hiding content
Using spam commenting to get backlinks
Duplicate content on a site
Spinning articles and recycling
Keyword stuffing
A.K.A don’t use these methods or you'll get a slap on the wrist from the powers that be!
White Hat SEO
Having a website abundant in keyword-rich text and key phrases to anticipate as many search queries as possible..
The creation of media content such as press clippings, e-zines or newsletters to maintain inbound links.
Varying search phrases and employing them in the first 100 words of content.
Crosslinks between pages on the same site.
Providing greater number of links to the main pages of the website.
Using other websites to link back to the original.
Employing a mixture of keywords and key phrases in conjunction with brand/business being promoted via other methods of marketing, whether paid or organic.
Content
No SEO strategy is complete without a diligent dedication to content creation. It’s the cornerstone of marketing. Modern SEO revolves around your audience, therefore, content has a major role in SEO. Creating outstanding content will help you attract the users, which will also be a signal to search engines that your site provides value, thus improving ranking of your website.
If you have any questions about SEO, content marketing, or need a hand jazzing up your strategy contact info@thebeardedirishman.com
