Organic SEO: Optimise your Website for free! (1st Part)
At first sight, search engine optimisation, SEO in short, seems to be a very complex topic; and it certainly was for me when I started looking at it in greater details! The benefits are huge though and it is worth spending time understanding what SEO is about and how your business can benefit from it. In this post, I would like to share with you some of my insights in SEO to help you get it right faster and Optimise your website for free!
First, here are some key definitions:
Organic SEO: In general means the free optimisation of your website and other sources to be found on the on top of Google’s search results (and of course in other search engines like Bing or Yahoo as well). There are two main fields: Onsite and Off-site SEO.
Onsite SEO: Refers to the optimisation on your own website.
Off-site SEO: Refers to the optimisation of your presence on other channels, like social media or other webpages. Both onsite and off-site SEO are equally important for the final placement in the search results, so don’t just focus on one of them.
Thanks to technology and several super brains, Google’s whole assessment process where your page is ranked in the search results is done by an algorithm which is influenced by a lot of different indicators. You can split up these indicators in onsite SEO and off-site SEO again. If you’re like me, you’d be asking yourself: how does that algorithm work?!
To start easily, here’s the main process (the indicators are much more complicated to explain): Google explores the web by using an internal system called WebCrawler. This software works more or less like a snowball system: Google offers several “starting pages” to the WebCrawler and from then on the crawlers follow every link from one page to another and so on. This way Google finds every website, as long as there is at least one link which refers to it. Random stat: one third of the worldwide internet traffic is generated by Google’s WebCrawler!! To keep it simple, for your website to be found it is essential to have a lot of links pointing towards your homepage. Every time the WebCrawler returns to your site, Google will put it in his index and increase your ranking so your site is more findable! Nevertheless, be aware that too many links could also harm your placement because of link-spamming! To prevent link-spamming, Google added an update to the software which also assesses the quality of the website from which the WebCrawler was forwarded to your page. So links from “bad” pages will definitely harm your business.
Generally speaking, everything that harms your placement, e.g. these above-mentioned bad links from other pages or other kinds of con tricks, is called black hat SEO. The opposite, white hat SEO, means that you’re playing by the rules and that’s what you need to do to get the best optimization for your website! And always remember with SEO, it takes time (don’t expect instant benefits, it often takes a couple of months) and effort to do it well. So be patient and keep building those strong links so you get found!
Thank you for reading!
Moritz Maier-Borst
Moritz is a Junior Marketing Assistant at Sierra Marketing. Moritz has a passion for marketing to help start-up and small businesses grow beyond what they ever thought was possible. Moritz’ work at Sierra Marketing with clients including Study Network Australia, Careers Australia and Empower Institute. Moritz’ work mostly focuses on online marketing, social media and community management as well as market research.
