The latest buzzword in digital marketing is SEO or search engine optimisation. It’s become the main strategy that helps businesses thrive in the modern, information, and digital era where Google and other search engines dominate. Businesses from all over the world are, in one way or another, utilising SEO to rank their web pages and gain more online presence.
However, that doesn’t mean everyone is doing it right. SEO is a complex niche that involves many different fields and strategies. But if you ask business owners or marketers about it, most would have the misconception that SEO is only about keywords — finding the right queries, using them across their website, and that’s it but SEO is much more than that.
SEO encompasses a broad range of different processes, steps, and strategies to get a website or page rank on Google. Although keywords play an important in it, they need to be supplemented with other strategies to get the best results and fully optimise a website.
So if SEO isn’t just about keywords? What else is involved?
The Core Elements of SEO
SEO does not equate to only keywords. It can be broken down into several different elements which all work together to optimise a website and generate real results. Here are the most important elements of search engine optimisation:
Keyword Research
Let’s start with the most basic thing that everyone knows about SEO: keywords. Keywords that you should use for your website are revealed through a process called keyword research. It helps you uncover the queries that you need to be utilising in your website to describe your brand online.
Keywords are the foundation of your SEO efforts, dictating how you should be writing your content, building your links, etc. Considering how important keywords are in SEO, there’s no doubt why many people think that it’s all they need to optimise their sites. But it’s only the stepping stone to a much bigger picture — more on that later.
To effectively do keyword research, you need to conduct the following strategies:
- Choose the right keywords
- Analyze your competition
- Determine the search intent
Content
After keyword research comes the content, which is where you can showcase your products and services via Blogs, Pages and Visuals. Google ranks websites according to what provides value to readers, which is why having info-packed and valuable content is crucial to not only get your page to rank, but also attract potential customers and turn them into leads.
You need to create high-quality content that helps you convert. You can do this by taking the following factors into consideration and making sure that your content is:
- High-quality
- Caters to the search intent
- Fresh and up-to-date
- Relevant to the reader
- Easy to read and navigate
- Actionable
HTML
SEO is more than just about incorporating the elements of keyword research and content into pieces on your site. It’s also about everything as a whole, i.e. your website’s HTML. Before you can think about attracting your audience, you first need to get on the same page with Google. The search engine needs to be able to figure out what your site and content are about before it can decide whether or not to rank your page.
HTML may seem like an intimidating term that’s reserved for web developers and tech guys. However, in the context of SEO, it’s not as difficult as it looks. You just need to pay attention to these factors:
- Title tags
- H1 tags
- Meta description
- Schema
- Subheadings
- Alt text
- URL slug
These might seem like basic and small elements. However, optimising these HTML factors can go a long way in helping Google bots crawl your site, understand what it’s about, and rank you for appropriate search queries.
Site Architecture
Considering that Google’s priority is to give its users a high-quality search experience, paying attention to your site architecture is one of its core criteria. You need to make sure that your website satisfies Google’s requirements by making it:
- Easy to crawl and index
- Free from duplicate content
- Mobile-Friendly
- Fast
- Secure
Trust
Does Google trust you? This is an important question to ask yourself when building your website’s SEO. If Google can’t trust your website, how do you expect your visitors to? Google determines trust by looking at the following factors:
- Domain authority and page authority
- Bounce rate
- Domain age
Links
Many experts consider links as the most important ranking factors, which is why link building is such as important SEO strategy that you’d be remiss not to have. Building links that lead to your website from other pages on the web will help Google see you as a high-authority site, which consequently convinces it to rank you higher.
But Google can easily tell quality links from spammy ones. So make sure you take these link building factors into consideration:
- Link quality
- Anchor text
- Quantity of links
- Internal linking
How SME Digital Helps Optimise Your Website
As you can see, there’s so much more to SEO than just keywords. Several core elements make up an effective SEO strategy that will truly help you get results and push your business forward. But let’s admit — SEO can get very technical and complex. No worries, though, because we can help!
SME Digital is a local SEO company in Sydney that offers a comprehensive SEO service that will optimise your website and help you achieve a higher ranking. We work with our clients closely and understand everything about their industry, niche, market, and customers to procure tailored strategies that suit their needs and goals. With this information, our SEO consultants then build an SEO audit that outlines the steps we need to take to get your website to rank.
