SEO 101

I'm often asked what is SEO. Here's a quick and simple overview broken down into its component parts: Search | Engine | Optimisation.

SEARCH:
Decide on what search terms you should rank for: a short phrase like 'florist, Sydney', or 'physiotherapist for work compensation southern highlands', you need to build content around your industry, so that you appear in the search results your customers will be using.

Use your terms well, so they are readable within the content on your site, as well as in page and post titles and blog posts. Search Engines reward content that is useful to users once they arrive and the way they measure this is through time spent on page. Building a variety of content around the terms that best describe your business: pages, blog posts, social media content, audio and video, so people find what they are seeking and more, builds time on site, reducing 'bounce rate' (people arriving then quickly bouncing away in search of a shiny object).
Most importantly - make the content strong, personal, authentic, engaging to aim for visits, on page duration and shares

ENGINE:
Search engines are just that - machines that quantify activity. The more activity on your site; the longer people visit; the more valuable the content is, so that it's shared and linked to, and makes your site a popular destination, and, the more you're in your site adding, improving, blogging and sharing, the greater the reward from search Engines.

OPTIMISATION:
Optimising your site for search engines means employing the above elements to build:

• time on site as well
• repeat visits
• links back to your site from mentions and shares of your content -'backlinks'
• ensuring your site is performing well: it's loading quickly, the images and video are as small and lean as they can be by being saved correctly, named well and given meta information
• your site is responsive - it works well across phones and devices as well as desktop.

Search engines reward sites that deliver the best experience you can offer your user - consistently giving people good, helpful content, that will keep users on site, that users will want to share out, that presents you as an expert, that delivers great product in a helpful way, that shares out great content from across the web, building your audience by sharing content out.

Download our helpful cheat sheet to remind yourself when you're building content - what will give my customers the best experience?