So you want your website number one on Google right? And you've heard of a stuff called SEO that apparently can just do that. But what exactly is SEO? What does SEO involve? Is SEO gonna get your website on top of Google search results? This is precisely what we're going to see in this first post in a serie of SEO related articles.
What Is SEO?
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a process about making small modifications to parts of your website that when combined with other optimisations could have a noticeable impact on your website's visitor experience, your website's visibility in search engines and ultimately your website's performance in organic search results. We're speaking of little steps that can make a significant difference for your brand online.
Where do I start?
In order to determine what needs to be done you can start by checking how well your website is currently doing. Have your website tested by different people and see what they think of it, try searches with different sets of keywords and see what the rankings are, check your analytics – if you have any – and see who are your website's visitors, where they're coming from, what they're looking for and the pages they're looking at the most, etc. Those are basic elements to check before you do anything. No matter how daunting the process can be “a journey of one thousand miles starts with one single step”.
What should I look at?
Once you have correctly assessed what the current situation of your website is there may be more things for you to have a look at in order to improve its SEO such as creating unique page titles, avoiding duplicates, improving your website structure (links, navigation, etc.), optimising the content, promoting your website, etc. Those are but a few of the things to look at when optimising your website for search engines.
Does SEO apply to mobile sites?
While many mobile websites are designed with mobile viewing in mind, they aren't necessarily designed to be search friendly. A basic requirement is to make sure the page delivered to a mobile device matches its desktop equivalent so desktop and mobile search engines return the same website pages for the same keywords.
Can my website be #1 on Google?
Eventually… Remember SEO is essentially a process to gradually improve your website's performance which can be reflected on rankings indeed. However no matter how good that process is “No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google.” – Google dixit.