The basis of Search Engine Optimisation 

The SEO concept has always been a hard one for me to grasp. What’s more, I work with a team of web developers who are essentially experts in this field. Don’t think I haven’t attempted having a number of chats with them to find out exactly the purpose of SEO and its functions. I reckon their level of expertise is rather too tekkie for me.  

An opportunity to understand the SEO concept better presented itself when my promotions team was wondering how it’s possible that we would have such a great amount of traffic on our blogging page. As if they didn’t think that their content was good enough, right? The truth is, the content is in fact great; great not because of any said measure of quality but great because we post what we know, what we are experts in, and what we have learned and experienced. We read a lot too, but more than that we are curious individuals and sharing knowledge is what we do as a team. So here was an exciting opportunity to learn what we were doing right on our blog page that got us such impressive traffic; which I’m excited to share with the team in our next promotions meeting.

Here’s some of the must know basics. First let’s look at the term SEO – Google has developed automatic algorithms that rank your site. They send out what they call “spiders” to “crawl” your site and check it for over 100 indicators that determine whether your site is valuable or useless. These indicators include backlinks, domain age, traffic, fresh content and so forth. SEO is therefore the art of making sure those spiders are happy with what they find. So, my next assignment was to find out what made those spiders happy on our blogging page, and a few things proved to be critical:

·    domain and hosting 

It’s important to have own domain and hosting site, as this indicates a platform that is serious and trustworthy. Unfortunately, free blog set ups don’t do any favours for your SEO efforts. We use our collaborative website to post the blogs.

·      Solve problems with original content

Remember that Google’s mandate is to provide its customers with relevant and useful search results. As mentioned above, we only post what we know and have experienced, moreover our content expands to video links, our collaborative platforms and other sites. Our blog site has evidently become a place where we expose our service and product offerings.

·      Build relevant backlinks

A backlink is when another website links back to your site from their site. For example, our company is listed on our CSI organisations’ and partners’ websites as well. But what’s more important in blogging is that backlinks to your own content is very important. As a result, we would backlink our blogs on all our social media sites and email signatures.

There are many more simple articles on search engine optimisation out there, such as “Search Engine Optimising your Blog” by Hubspot. This blog introduces marketers to the importance of SEO and how they can use it to draw traffic to their site. I’m also still keen to learn more, so if you know of any interesting SEO secrets or have discovered something interesting, please do share on the comment box below.

Sources:

Hubsport.com

blogtyrant.com

Talitha Hlaka, is Indigo New Media’s head of promotions, account manager and collaboration champion.