THE PILLARS OF SEO

While SEO trends and techniques may change from year to year, the 4 pillars remain largely the same and are a good indicator of whether your web developer or SEO strategist is on the right track.

Listen out for these basics in your next planning session!

While SEO trends and techniques may change from year to year, the 4 pillars remain largely the same and are a good indicator of whether your web developer or SEO strategist is on the right track.

Listen out for these basics in your next planning session!

Your website can generate more leads with professional SEO services

Search Engine Optimisation is about making your website easy for search engines, like Google, to understand. This in turn helps search engines match your website to relevant search queries and may result in you getting more leads!

Why do you need SEO?

Google processes around 63 000 search queries per second, directing them to the most relevant content that it has indexed from the web.

Indexing is when Google electronically crawls your website in an effort to understand your offering and how you’ve structured your website to portray that. Google then adds this ‘site map’ to its own databases for easy reference. When potential customers do a Google search for a specific topic, Google does not scour the internet to determine a match, but rather draws on its ‘index’ of the websites that it has already crawled.

SEO services – what’s included?

While most websites are optimised for specific keywords and search phrases when they’re developed, these search terms may change over time and your website needs to follow suit if you’re to capitalise on the latest and most current search phrases for your industry, products and services.

In a nutshell, SEO has 4 main pillars: Technical SEO, Content SEO, On-site SEO & Off-site SEO.

1. Technical SEO

Technical SEO services involve optimising the architecture of your website so that search engines can easily crawl and index it. Helping them properly understand and categorise your website’s content is the foundation of your SEO strategy.

If you’re talking to a potential SEO services provider, listen out for words like “robots.txt files”, “sitemaps”, “meta tags”, “mobile responsiveness” and “site speed” and then ask what these mean and how each could benefit your website.

2. Content alignment

With Google constantly refining its search algorithms to measure additional metrics associated with high-quality content (like currency of information and expertise), website content has become the very foundation of good SEO practices. The structure of your copy, application of keywords and keyword variables, tagging of images and interlinking of related content is now more important than ever before.

The buzz words in content SEO include “quality”, “keywords”, “recency” and “relevancy”. Make sure that your website is packed with high-quality, engaging and SEO-focussed copy.

3. On-site | On-page SEO

On-page optimisation is exactly that – it is the meticulous optimising of each of your website pages for specific keywords.  It includes, amongst others, crafting quality page titles and meta descriptions (these appear in search results), tagging headings and sub-headings so that Google can understand the content hierarchy, tagging images to show relevance and cross linking similar content.

As On-page SEO also factors in page structure and content allocation, getting it right will not only make your website more meaningful to search engines, but also enhance user experience.

4. Off-site | Off-page SEO

Off-page SEO refers to external actions which drive traffic to your website and ultimately improve its credibility, authority and popularity. Search engines will not simply accept that you own the ‘best burger joint in Cape Town’ because your website says so. Instead, they will use real user-data gathered from multiple sources across the web to verify that you are indeed Cape Town’s best.

Off-page SEO will, for example, leverage ‘back-links’ that point from other ‘higher authority’ websites to yours, local search profiles like Google Maps, Google My Business, customer reviews posted on independent websites and mentions on social media.

The bottom line on SEO services

While providing a comprehensive SEO checklist and guideline is well beyond the scope of this basic overview SEO, applying the basics will go a long way toward being better placed on search results.

A website without good SEO is much like a car without an engine – you’ll not be going anywhere!

Post penned by the Cadiz Digital team.

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