media update’s Adam Wakefield spoke to those in the know about what SEO is, why it is important, and what can be done to push a page’s ranking up the charts.

What is SEO and why is it so important?

SEO has been around since about 1993, when platforms like Excite took web cataloguing to the next level. The likes of Yahoo, in 1994, and Google, in 1997, then opened their doors, with SEO evolving ever since.

According to Deon Malan, senior SEO specialist at ROI Digital, SEO consists of strategies, techniques, and tactics all working together to increase the number of visitors to a website.

“This is achieved, in part, by increasing a website’s visibility and position within search engines, i.e. higher rankings. More importantly than just driving up traffic numbers, the quality of the traffic plays a huge part in ensuring higher conversions or sales,” Malan says.

“SEO is important for businesses because, without it, potential customers may not be able to reach a specific website unless they already know about it.”

As noted by Shaun Scheepers, digital specialist at MediaCom, a business wants their website to appear on the first page of search results when a person searches for terms and words related to the products and services that business sells.

Website scoring and why it changes

Google is the most dominant search engine in the English-speaking world, but it is accompanied by other important players such as Bing and Yahoo. Each of these engines scores every single website based on a variety of factors to determine the quality of a website, and how relevant it is to the terms people search, as Scheepers notes.

“Their goal is to serve the most relevant search results so that people keep using their search engine. The more people they have using their search engines, the more advertising revenue they can make. This is why they are constantly adjusting and fine-tuning their algorithms.”

Malan says ROI Digital primarily works with Google, and that Google uses approximately 200 different ranking factors for websites. These need to be kept in mind if you are building or optimising a website.

“Some of the factors taken into account include: the age of the domain; whether the keyword appears in the Top Level Domain; whether the primary keyword is in the title tag; does the keyword appear in the H1 tag; length of content; site speed; and much, much more,” Malan explains.

However, no search engine is static, with the factors they use to rank websites changing continuously. The reason they do this is one part business evolution, in an effort to serve users with the most relevant results, and another to combat black hat SEO.

Scheepers says both white and black hat SEO have the same goal: “It is all about getting your website to rank higher in search results”.

“Black Hat SEO uses strategies and tactics to manipulate the search bots/spiders into getting better rankings by faking quality signals that they know search spiders are looking for,” he says.

“This tactic goes against Google‘s webmaster guidelines and can get you banned. Apart from this risk, most of the time, these websites offer poor-quality content to users, resulting in a very bad user experience.”

How to improve your SEO results

There are a number of strategies that can be used to improve a website’s SEO performance, but to start with, Scheepers recommends ensuring Google is able to read all your content and that the website’s URL structure has a highly defined hierarchy.

“Once this is done, add great content to the mix and market the website by telling people about it on social media, promoting it through partnerships and creating awareness through bloggers,” he says.

According to Ruan Smit, senior SEO specialist at ROI Digital, it all depends on the kind of results you want to achieve, the industry you are working with and budget.

“It all comes down to creating an ideal environment for your visitors and Google. The strategy doesn't stop at just getting people to your domain, but also successfully converting them once they are there,” Smit says.

Smit advises that, on a technical level, websites should:

Where to start on your SEO

The best way to start is to create two types of accounts. First, create a Google Analytics account to track your data and be able to interpret, and report on, how people are interacting with your website. Running through Google’s Academy for Beginners is the best place to start.

Your second account should be Search Console, previously known as Webmaster Tools, which is Google’s platform to communicate with you as the website owner and lists what could be improved on your domain.

“On a technical level for visitors, the website should make it possible to deliver on the needs of the visitor. Furthermore, it should have a simplified and uncluttered layout that drives conversions through clear calls to action. It should also have great server/page load times to avoid frustration,” Smit says.

“From the perspective of content on your site, you should investigate who your visitors are by using your Demographics section on Google Analytics. Next, you should research what your readers are interested in and produce content – backed with keyword research – that will bring your readers back for more.”

Finding the balance between high search volume keywords, optimising your content for SEO, and creating interesting articles usually brings results.

Smit says Google is primarily focused on giving users the best possible result based on their search. If you create a website with high quality user experience, which guides users through a logical conversion process, it could help place you higher in the search results pages.

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Improving your SEO isn’t the only way to get people to read your articles. Read more in our article, Is multimedia journalism the way forward?