What does SEO stand for?
Well, the acronym ‘SEO’ stands for Search Engine Optimisation and involves the process of improving your position in the “organic” results of search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo.
How do you rank number 1 on Google?
A huge number of factors influence organic rankings. Google uses a secret algorithm to rank websites and SEO professionals try to work out what those factors are to take advantage and ultimately rank #1 on Google!
This rather amusing video gives a little bit of an insight into the challenges facing anyone trying to rank number 1 on Google:
How do I perform SEO in my company?
Without giving a really fluffy answer, SEO is in fact everybody’s job. For example, editorial and content teams need to provide relevant, unique copy on a regular basis (spam, copy content or ‘rite baddly’ and you’ll suffer!). Your PR teams need to keep up brand mentions and citations to play into the hands of the increasingly ‘brand aware’ algorithm and your all-important Tech teams need to ensure site content is accessible or ‘crawlable’ by spiders at all times.
Off & Onsite – Why is SEO a game of Two Halves
Not something you’d want to elaborate too much on at a dinner party but essentially the ‘game’ of SEO consists of two halves (and to keep the football analogy going, there are goals at each end too!). There’s what happens on your site and what happens off it. So, factors that will influence your rankings from an onsite perspective include things like relevancy of content, ease of navigation for Google’s ‘spiders’ and your customers (who could forget those guys hey?!), technical elements such as sitemaps, internal linking structures and meta tags. Meanwhile, in layman’s terms, the SEO goal from an offsite point of view is to generate as many natural digital signals to your site as possible providing you’re playing within the Google Webmaster Guidelines. These guidelines are constantly evolving and failure to follow ‘the rules’ could see your site penalised and removed from Google overnight (it’s not quite as simple as asking all your friends and family to link to your website). Google is ultimately a link based algorithm and loves following links all around the internet, trying to discover new content and in turn serve ‘Googlers’ with the most relevant, accurate and useful search results possible.