The Why and How of SEO

The world of search engine optimization is complex and ever-changing, but you can easily understand the basics, and even a small amount of knowledge can make a big difference.

Combine this information with some practice and you are well on your way to becoming a savvy SEO.

67k searches are performed on Google every second. Meaning a website with optimal SEO can bring in more customers than a shop with flashing neon lights in the centre of any city.

If your website is not on the first search engine results page or SERP then the chances of someone choosing your website become slim to none.

“Why not just buy search engine ads?”

Paid advertisements from all the US searches only generated 2.8% of people clicks. while SEO has 20X more traffic opportunities the PPC (Paid per click)

The world of search engine optimization is complex and ever-changing, but you can easily understand the basics, and even a small amount of knowledge can make a big difference

however, there is a right and a wrong way to approach SEO The right way using White Hat SEO strategies follows best practices and strategies that abide by search engine rules.

The wrong way using Black Hat SEO strategies are strategies that attempt to spam/fool search engines and puts the risk of the website being penalized or de-indexed. email info@cryt.ie to find out more if your SEO agency is using black hat strategies.

First, we should know how Search engines work Every search engine has three main functions: crawling (to discover content), indexing (to track and store content), and retrieval (to fetch relevant content when users query the search engine).

crawling: A search engine uses web crawlers to visit domains with web servers and scrap information from them following a robot.txt file which tells all scrapers what they are allowed and not allowed scrap on the server.

Indexing: When a search engine crawler gets a website it will index that link store in a database and follow all other links on the webpage and also scrap and store their index.

retrieval: when a search engine tries to retrieve content for a search request it will first look at the search result and put an intent type on it it.

Search Engines use intent types these are the type of information a user is looking for

• Informational: Search for information i.e companies names
• Navigational: Searching for a specific website
• Transactional: Searching to buy something
• more: https://yoast.com/search-intent/

First of most search engines have guidelines that you must follow or you will be in the Black hat territory
On-Page SEO:

• We will look at the technicals of SEO first a website that loads fast and has clear content and whom’s html is not malformed will be better ranked.
• Mobile friendly websites also have a higher ranking.
• Websites that don’t go down or crash can be ranked higher
• Create a blog its a great way to share knowledge collaborate and also bring traffic to your website Use up to five primary keywords using Google Keyword Planner and similar services for other search engines.
• Websites that contain related metadata in their headers

Off-Page SEO:

• Link Building is when other website link to pages on your website.
• Social bookmarking is when you link to your website from your social media account

There is much more you can do and many tools you can use to improve SEO however I hope you at least of a basic understanding of why and how you should SEO your website.