Search Engine Optimisation, or SEO is the process by which we can improve the visibility of a website or webpage in organic search results. In simple terms, the better your SEO the higher you will rank on search engines, and hopefully you will get more traffic to your website.

Okay, so how can I improve my SEO?

We know some fundamentals when it comes to SEO, but to be honest, if you’re looking at Google as a search engine – no one really knows exactly what it is they want. Google change their algorithms often, so that websites, companies, businesses etc can’t fix their website to suit the rules.

In the “old days”, when Google and search engines relied on keywords for example, you would get websites which were littered in them – hidden the same colour as the website, in the footer, pages covered in the same words or phrases. The general idea here was, the more times the keyword or phrase appeared, the higher in the ranking the website would be. Nowadays, tactics and strategies that are trying to focus only on search engines and ignoring the “human” audience of websites as know as Black Hat SEO tactics. This is why Google and other search engines change their algorithsm so frequently.

So, what do we know?

A recent web developers survey  (2015) gave the following results on how important certain aspects of your online presence are in affecting SEO:

  • 23% importance placed on the trust/authority of the host domain
  • 22% importance of the link popularity of a specific page
  • 20% important in regards to the anchor text of external links to the page
  • 15% based on page keyword useage
  • 6% registration & hosting data
  • 6% traffic & CTR data
  • 5% social graph metrics

What we do know is that Google is pushing the human audience and the social aspect of websites and SEO. Google wants to provide its users with useful, informative content, it wants to know that you are the authority in your field and so it is constantly looking to see what people are saying about you.

This fantastic infographic from Search Engine Land lists a range of on the page and off the page factors which affect your SEO, and which we go into more details on in other blog posts.

Search Engine Land Periodic Table of SEO Success Factors