One of the popular questions that we get from our clients here at DomainPlus is – what is SEO and how does it work?
SEO, also known as Search Engine Optimization is the process of optimizing your website to get the best out of organic traffic from the search engine result page (SERP). SEO involves improving changes in website content and design to ‘speak’ to a search engine. As a result, you will hope that the search engine will display your website as the top result in the SERP.
As SEO practice can be quite complicated to understand, the fundamental process and factors are not as difficult. In short, search engines want to provide the best result and relevant solutions for their users. For example:
Search engines will scan for websites that are easy-to-read, easy-to-navigate and reward them by increasing their ranking in the search engine results page. Therefore, SEO is the process that individuals/companies/brands go through make sure their website ranks high for the relevant keywords and phrases (the terms that users will search).
SEO can benefit your business in many ways. Not only will it help you to grow your visibility and engagement more potential customers
Factors Affecting SEO
1. Meta Title and Meta Description
Optimizing your website content means optimizing the meta title, meta description and focus key phrase too. A good plugin would be Yoast. Craft your content and ensure all your pages and blog posts have a green light. Include a keyword rich title and description that can best describe your content. There are many sites and tools out there that help generate related search keywords. One of our favourites is Google Keyword Planner.
2. Page Click-Through Rate (CTR)
Increasing your CTR can help improve your ranking in search engine. There are effective keywords that you can include in your title and description such as Today, Right Now, Fast, Step-by-Step, Simple. You can also add numbers, for example “10 Ways to Stay Healthy”. Ensuring a high CTR will boost your website up to the top of SERP.
3. Website Loading Speed
When Google evaluates your website, they take into consideration of your page loading time. “Faster sites create happy users and we’ve seen in our internal studies that when a site responds slowly, visitors spend less time there.”. Here are some ways on how you can speed up your website easily:
- Reduce image size — optimize images for speed
- Minimize HTTP requests
- Minify and combine files
- Choose the right hosting plan — one that’s fit to cater for your visitor size.
4. SSL Certificate
Not only will SSL Certificate make your website more legit and credible, but it will also give you a lift in the search result. Read more: Do SSL Certificates Affect SEO?
While there are many other factors that can affect your SEO, it is important that you understand and practice these fundamentals consistently.
In conclusion, without active effort in SEO these days, no business can survive long. By increasing your search visibility, you can expand your visitors reach, and generate better conversions in return. And remember, SEO requires consistent and conscious efforts, as Rome wasn’t built in one day.
