seo consultancy

Search engine optimization

Practice of increasing online visibility in search engine results pages Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the quality and quantity of website traffic website web page search engines SEO targets unpaid traffic (known as "natural" or " organic " results) rather than direct traffic or paid traffic . Unpaid traffic may originate from different kinds of searches, including image search video search academic search news search, and industry-specific vertical search Internet marketing strategy, SEO considers how search engines work, the computer-programmed algorithms that dictate search engine behavior, what people search for, the actual search terms or keywords typed into search engines, and which search engines are preferred by their targeted audience. SEO is performed because a website will receive more visitors from a search engine when websites rank higher on the search engine results page (SERP). These visitors can then potentially be converted into customers.

Getting indexed

Search engines use complex mathematical algorithms to interpret which websites a user seeks. In this diagram, where each bubble represents a website, programs sometimes called spiders examine which sites link to which other sites, with arrows representing these links. Websites getting more inbound links, or stronger links, are presumed to be more important and what the user is searching for. In this example, since website B is the recipient of numerous inbound links, it ranks more highly in a web search. And the links "carry through", such that website C, even though it only has one inbound link, has an inbound link from a highly popular site (B) while site E does not. Note: Percentages are rounded.

The leading search engines, such as Google, Bing and Yahoo!, use crawlers to find pages for their algorithmic search results. Pages that are linked from other search engine indexed pages do not need to be submitted because they are found automatically. The Yahoo! Directory DMOZ , two major directories which closed in 2014 and 2017 respectively, both required manual submission and human editorial review.

Google Search Console , for which an XML Sitemap feed can be created and submitted for free to ensure that all pages are found, especially pages that are not discoverable by automatically following links in addition to their URL submission console.

Yahoo! formerly operated a paid submission service that guaranteed crawling for a cost per click however, this practice was discontinued in 2009.

Search engine crawlers may look at a number of different factors when crawling a site. Not every page is indexed by the search engines. The distance of pages from the root directory of a site may also be a factor in whether or not pages get crawled.

Today, most people are searching on Google using a mobile device.

In November 2016, Google announced a major change to the way crawling websites and started to make their index mobile-first, which means the mobile version of a given website becomes the starting point for what Google includes in their index.

In May 2019, Google updated the rendering engine of their crawler to be the latest version of Chromium (74 at the time of the announcement). Google indicated that they would regularly update the Chromium rendering engine to the latest version.

In December 2019, Google began updating the User-Agent string of their crawler to reflect the latest Chrome version used by their rendering service. The delay was to allow webmasters time to update their code that responded to particular bot User-Agent strings. Google ran evaluations and felt confident the impact would be minor.

Increasing prominence

A variety of methods can increase the prominence of a webpage within the search results.

Cross linking between pages of the same website to provide more links to important pages may improve its visibility. Writing content that includes frequently searched keyword phrase, so as to be relevant to a wide variety of search queries will tend to increase traffic. Updating content so as to keep search engines crawling back frequently can give additional weight to a site. Adding relevant keywords to a web page's metadata, including the title tag and meta description , will tend to improve the relevancy of a site's search listings, thus increasing traffic.

URL canonicalization of web pages accessible via multiple URLs, using the canonical link element 301 redirects can help make sure links to different versions of the URL all count towards the page's link popularity score.

Also, in the recent times Google is giving more priority to the below elements for SERP (Search Engine Ranking Position).

HTTPS version (Secure Site)

Page Speed

Structured Data

Mobile Compatibility

AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages)

BERT

As marketing strategy

SEO is not an appropriate strategy for every website, and other Internet marketing strategies can be more effective, such as paid advertising through pay per click (PPC) campaigns, depending on the site operator's goals.

Search engine marketing (SEM) is the practice of designing, running and optimising search engine ad campaigns. Its difference from SEO is most simply depicted as the difference between paid and unpaid priority ranking in search results. SEM focuses on prominence more so than relevance; website developers should regard SEM with the utmost importance with consideration to visibility as most navigate to the primary listings of their search.

A successful Internet marketing campaign may also depend upon building high-quality web pages to engage and persuade internet users, setting up analytics programs to enable site owners to measure results, and improving a site's conversion rate In November 2015, Google released a full 160-page version of its Search Quality Rating Guidelines to the public, which revealed a shift in their focus towards "usefulness" and mobile local search . In recent years the mobile market has exploded, overtaking the use of desktops, as shown in by StatCounter in October 2016 where they analyzed 2.5 million websites and found that 51.3% of the pages were loaded by a mobile device.

Google has been one of the companies that are utilizing the popularity of mobile usage by encouraging websites to use their Google Search Console , the Mobile-Friendly Test, which allows companies to measure up their website to the search engine results and determine how user-friendly their websites are.

SEO may generate an adequate return on investment . However, search engines are not paid for organic search traffic, their algorithms change, and there are no guarantees of continued referrals. Due to this lack of guarantee and the uncertainty, a business that relies heavily on search engine traffic can suffer major losses if the search engines stop sending visitors.

Search engines can change their algorithms, impacting a website's search engine ranking, possibly resulting in a serious loss of traffic. According to Google's CEO, Eric Schmidt, in 2010, Google made over 500 algorithm changes click here – almost 1.5 per day.

It is considered a wise business practice for website operators to liberate themselves from dependence on search engine traffic.

In addition to accessibility in terms of web crawlers (addressed above), user web accessibility has become increasingly important for SEO.

Why do you need SEO?

Building a strong site architecture and providing clear navigation will help search engines index your site quickly and easily. This will also, more importantly, provide visitors with a good experience of using your site and encourage repeat visits. It's worth considering that Google is increasingly paying attention to user experience.

When it comes to how much traffic is driven by search engines to your website, the percentage is substantial, and perhaps the clearest indicator of the importance of SEO Conductor suggested 64% of all web traffic comes from organic search, compared to 2% from social, 6% from paid search, 12% direct and 15% from other referral sources.

This tallies with our own data, with approximately 70-75% of SEW traffic coming from organic.

Semrush Keyword Difficulty Analytics Searchmetrics Core Web Vitals Study Analytics The Ultimate Guide to Forum Link Building in 2020 Analytics Top 5 SEO Mistakes

Google accounts for more than 90% of global organic search traffic. So obviously you need a strong presence on Google SERPs, but how strong?

Well, according to this study from Advanced Web Ranking (which I've trotted out before when discussing how to dominate Google ) shows that on the first SERP, the top five results account for 67.60% of all clicks and the results from six to 10 account for only 3.73%.

It's therefore vital that your site appears in the top five results.

How are you going to achieve this? With the following tips, which I've split into two categories: what search engines are looking for and… drum roll… what they're not looking for.

1) Relevancy

Search engines try to provide the most relevant results to a searcher's query, whether it's a simple answer to the question “how old is Ryan Gosling?” (the answer of which Google will likely provide without you having to leave the SERP) to more complicated queries such as “what is the best steak restaurant nearest to me?”

How search engines provide these results is down to their own internal algorithms, which we'll probably never truly determine, but there are factors that you can be certain will influence these results and they're all based around relevancy… For instance: a searcher's location, their search history, time of day/year, etc.

2) The quality of your content

Do you regularly publish helpful, useful articles, videos or other types of media that are popular and well produced? Do you write for actual human beings rather than the search engine itself? Well, you should. Latest research from Searchmetrics on ranking factors indicates that Google is moving further towards longer-form content that understands a visitor's intention as a whole, instead of using keywords based on popular search queries to create content.

Basically, stop worrying about keywords and focus on the user experience.

3) User experience

There are many SEO benefits for providing the best possible user experience . You need an easily navigable, clearly searchable site with relevant internal linking and related content. All the stuff that keeps visitors on your webpage and hungry to explore further.

5) Cross-device compatibility

Is your website and its content equally optimised for any given screen size or device? Bear in mind that Google has stated that responsive design is its preferred method of mobile optimisation.

6) Internal linking

We've talked about the benefits of ensuring your site has clear and easy-to-use navigation, but there's also a practice that editors and writers can carry out when publishing articles to help push traffic around the site and that may lead to higher trust signals for Google:

internal linking . (See what we did there.) Internal linking has many advantages:

It provides your audience with further reading options. As long as they're relevant and you use clear anchor text (the clickable highlighted words in any give link). This can help reduce your bounce rates It helps to improve your ranking for certain keywords. If we want this article to rank for the term ' SEO basics ' then we can begin linking to it from other posts using variations of similar anchor text. This tells Google that this post is relevant to people searching for ‘ SEO basics '. Some experts recommend varying your anchor text pointing to the same page as Google may see multiple identical uses as ‘suspicious'.

It helps Google crawl and index your site. Those little Googlebots that are sent out to fetch new information on your site will have a better idea of how useful and trustworthy your content is, the more they crawl your internal links.

If your site isn't in Google

Although Google crawls billions of pages, it's inevitable that some sites will be missed. When our crawlers miss a site, it's frequently for one of the following reasons:

The site isn't well connected from other sites on the web

You've just launched a new site and Google hasn't had time to crawl it yet

The design of the site makes it difficult for Google to crawl its content effectively

Google received an error when trying to crawl your site

Your policy blocks Google from crawling the site