Understanding SEO for Beginners

Oct 25, 2019 | Blog Writing Services, Content writing, Optimised website content, SEO Ireland |

Understanding SEO for Beginners

What is SEO?

S – SEARCH
E – ENGINE
O - OPTIMISATION

Search Engine Optimisation is the practice of optimising your website so that it can be easily found by the search engines.

In this blog post I am going to address some basic questions about SEO, how it works and why it’s important for your website.

How does the Google search engine work?

When a searcher enters a keyword or phrase into the search box on Google.com, Google searches their indexes for those keywords or phrases.

Google then presents the searcher with what it deems to be the most relevant results.
How does Google do this?
Google does this by:
Crawling: Crawling is the process by which ‘Googlebot’ discovers new and updated pages to be added to the Google index. Your website must have a robots.txt file that indicates your permission to Google and other search engines to crawl and index your site.
Indexing: 
From the desk of Google:
“Googlebot processes each of the pages it crawls in order to compile a massive list of all the words it sees and their location on each page. In addition, we process information in key content tags and attributes, such as titles tags and alt attributes. Googlebot can process many, but not all, content types. For example, we cannot process the content of some rich media files or dynamic pages”
Serving up the Results: When a searcher enters a keyword or phrase in the search bar, Google searches the existing index of matching pages and returns them in what they deem to be the most relevant order.
How can I encourage Google to show my website in the search results?
There are a number of ways in which you can organically improve your rankings:
  • Use keywords and key phrases in the main body of your content/blog posts/articles.
  • Use keywords and key phrases in all headings and titles.
  • Tag all blog posts with keywords.
  • Use categories that contain keywords.
  • Use ALT tags and descriptions for all images (include keywords).
  • Use keywords and phrases in page descriptions and titles.

Is it possible to over-optimise?

Yes, Google is very clear about the conditions for optimisation. They require well-written content that is informative and relevant. Over optimisation may be seen as spamming and this could result in your website being penalised and dropped from the Google index entirely.

Avoid the following:

  • Keyword stuffing - keep your keywords below 3% of the total content.
  • Duplicate content - publish only original content on your website.
  • Cloaking - hiding information from the user that is not hidden from the search engines.
  • Link farms - never purchase links.

Should you have any questions about SEO or how it can work for your business, please get in touch by filling out the contact form below and I’ll be in touch as soon as I receive your message.