In this talk, I'll cover what SEO is and how you can use an understanding of it to possibly get higher up in Google search engine results.
What is SEO?
SEO stands for 'Search Engine Optimisation’, and it involves trying to optimise the content on your website so that search engines may understand it better. Hopefully, this means you can rank higher in Search Engine Results Pages (SERP).
Where Is Google in All This?
It isn't easy to talk about SEO without mentioning Google since they are the most widely used search engine by a long way. There are others of course—such as Yahoo, Bing, and Duck Duck Go, but for simplicity, in the video, I'll use Google interchangeably with search engine results since this is what people are used to.
Understanding Search Results
Search results are usually split into two different sections.
The first section is made up of paid-for advertisements, and are labelled as “sponsored” results. Sponsored search results are artificially boosted listings. To appear in this position companies need to pay search engines.
The next section is made up of results search engines think might be relevant. These are known as “Organic results”. They're called organic because they are not artificially boosted. Search engines think they may be useful to you purely based on their website content.
A company's strategy may appear in both of these sections but aiming for a good organic rank is always best because it's sustainable—and it's virtually free apart from your time and effort.
How Do Results Work?
Each result is made up of a title and a description. You can control both of these things, which is really powerful for persuading people to click through to your website.
You can kind of cheat and see what your title will be by looking at the title of a browser tab. On the other hand, if you don't explicitly set it, your listed description is naturally taken from the first few words on the page. This is OK sometimes, but it's undesirable most of the time since you want to curate more of a quick alternative ‘elevator pitch’ for people scanning search results.
How to Set Your Page Title and Meta Description
Unfortunately, this totally differs depending on which CMS (Content Management System) you're using. For example, if you're using WordPress, then you may be able to set this within the Yoast SEO plugin settings, or if you're using a more bespoke CMS, I suggest you try and find some kind of “Page Details” section where it might have the option to set Title and Meta Description.
When writing a Meta Description bear in mind, this should be a summary of the content on the page—it may even be very similar to the first paragraph, but tailored slightly.
Once you've updated your Meta Description, you may need to be patient before search engines update this in their listings. Search engines deploy “bots” to “craw” the internet, and it may take a few days to understand that your content has changed.
If you're a confident computer user, it's possible to see the Meta Description broadcasted on your site by looking under the hood of your web page. It may differ slightly depending on your browser, but with Chrome, for example, you can right-click anywhere on the page and select “View Page Source”. A new tab will open up, showing the page's underlying code. Here you need to find something called <meta name="description">. The easiest way to find this is by using the ‘find’ tool in your browser. You can typically use this by pressing cmd + f on macOS or ctrl + f on Windows. This will open up a small find dialogue (it may appear in the corner of the screen. If you type ‘description’, it will highlight every instance of this word on the page.
What Does Google Want From Your Website?
The reason Google is so popular is because it tends to give people the best search results. It'll serve you well to remember that Google's number one goal is to find the best content/give people what they want, so it can continue to be the most popular search engine.
For this reason, the best way to climb higher in search results is to improve the quality of your content. Search engines continuously ‘crawl’ your website to understand what kind of content you have. Every search engine will have its own algorithm to try and understand the value of your content. This algorithm is constantly being tweaked, and no one knows exactly what it is—it's each search engines ‘secret sauce’. However, they do publish tips and articles to help you understand what they're looking for.
Invest in Good quality content
The most frequent recommendation from search engines is to put out good quality content as often as is relevant to your website.
I recommend you put time aside—maybe every week—to write a single blog post. Most SEO specialists will tell you to write a blog because they add in-depth miscellaneous content to your website without bloating your site structure. Pick things you enjoy writing about or topics where you have the expertise, so it's easy for you to develop the habit. If you're unsure about a topic, maybe ask a local group what they'd like to know—engage with your audience and tell a story.
I recommend writing long-form articles that are at least 300 words on a particular topic. A really great example of this is a site in the web industry called CSS-Tricks. Content posted on this site is regular and deep, and because search engines see this, the site is recognised as a source of authority. If you search anything to do with websites or code, you'll find CSS-Tricks at the top of results.
It's important not to attempt to ‘trick’ search engines here because it could backfire long-term. When search engines were young, some SEO “experts” would push businesses to use underhand tactics to fool search engines short-term. This may have worked in the past, but since search engines’ algorithms are ever-evolving, it may no longer work, and you may even get penalised if an underhand tactic is recognised.
Be specific and be original—the more you target a post or page towards a specific topic, the more search engines will understand the page you're writing about.
Make deep pages—I've seen many clients tempted to make “single-page” websites simply because they're trendy. In terms of SEO, this is generally a bad idea. The more varying content you have on a single page, the more you'll confuse search engines. Conversely, deep isolated pages on a single topic will help search engines recognise it as a source of helpful content on a specific topic.
Structure your content—in most content management systems; you can use different heading ‘levels’ to describe the content structure to search engines. For example, a Heading Level 1 is very important; a Heading Level 6 is the least important. You can do other things to convey semantic meaning to search engines, for example, using 'bold' (technically known as ‘strong’), ‘italic’. Using different formatting tells search engines that certain words have a weight or emphasis.
Improving Your Rankings Through Schema
Improving your content's meaning through schema is useful if you have a specific type of content on your website. A good example might be a recipe or a review.
Using schema helps search engines understand you're talking about specific things, such as cooking duration, instructions, or user reviews. To do this, you need to format the output in a particular way, using code that is not visible to users on the page. Because of this, you'll likely need a web developer to help you if you want to implement this—either that or you may find a specific website “theme” that has functionality geared towards what you do, e.g. a recipe theme that has a built-in schema.
You can use Google's documentation to get started or read up on the official Schema docs.
Advantages of using Schema
Search engines will typically place results that make good use of schema at the top of the page in a neat format, e.g. recipe cards or film reviews.
Implementing schema essentially means you're giving search engines—and therefore, people—richer information about your content.
Conclusion
Although you can do several technical things to improve your website's presence on search engines, the most effective thing you can do is to write helpful, in-depth content, as often as you can.