Why is it important?
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the process of improving the quality and quantity of website traffic to a website or a web page from search engines. SEO targets unpaid traffic (known as “natural” or “organic” results) rather than direct or paid traffic.
SEO, relies on the computer programmed algorithms that decide the search engine behaviour, what the person has searched for, the terms or keywords typed in. The engine uses a web crawler to which is an internet bot that systematically searches the world wide web for web index purposes.
SEO is performed because a website receives more visitors from a search engine when websites rank higher in the search engine results page (SERP). These visitors can be potentially converted into customers.
Direct or Paid results appear at the top of the SERP, the organic or natural adverts appear thereafter, so the importance is being top of this pile. This is by ensuring that the website or webpage is utilising the correct descriptions for the product or services that are on offer.
The scoring system for the site is out of 100, the higher the score the better the site rating with search engines.
What limits the score?
Meta descriptions are small blurbs you see in search results under the page titles. These are a quick description of what the content of the page is all about. These help both the people searching and the search engine crawlers to understand what is expected on each page. If duplications are found it makes the ranking process more difficult as the engine will have a hard time figuring out the differences between the pages and what should be ranked.
Certain pages can be set not to be ranked by including the term “noindex”.
Tags
Title tags, these should be original and unique. Duplicate title tags will make it more complicated to rank content in search results because the crawler won’t know which post to rank above the other. This is incredibly important to have unique and relevent title tags so that pages are not having to compete with one another. It is recommended to keep your title tag under 65 characters, as anything past this will be automatically cut from the search results page. Spaces count as characters, though it must be at least 30 characters long.
Heading tags, crawlers prefer properly structured content and heirarchy. The H1 tag is critical as it tells the search engine what the content is about. There should only be on H1 tag for each page.
Load time
Load time, refers to the time it takes for the entire site to render into your browser displaying all parts of the html, no matter the smart device that it is loaded on. It is vital that the site loads quickly, the faster the better.
URLs
URL format, to ensure that the site is SEO friendly especially for Google rankings, the URL must not exceed 120 characters, the Slug is part of the URL that determines the identification of a particular web page on a website, in an easy to read form, it’s the part of the url that explains the content. Ensuring that it has the relevant wording in the title for the content in the post, avoiding symbols and underscores, too many different sub-folders is the key. Using only numbers, letters and dashes with in the url and avoiding the special characters; !, @, #, $, %, ^, &, *, (, ), [, ], ?, {, }, ;, :, “.
The shorter the slug the quicker for the page to be indexed.
Here at D365 Life with IT, we will assist keeping your site relevant so that it appears higher up in the natural search on Google, we will also provide you with a monthly report.
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Remember you can also follow us / keep up to date at…. Facebook / Linked In / Blogs or sign up for our newsletter D365 Byte Sized
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