Search engine optimisation (known as SEO) is the process of making search-optimised improvements on and off your website to gain more exposure in the search engine results page (SERP).

Why is SEO Important

Top ranking listings on Google lead to more visitors finding your website and clicking through to your product offering.

Hot Tip: At the heart of it, Google tracks all content on the Internet and then delivers the most relevant and authoritative search results based on any keyword phrase a user types into the search bar.

The base work of SEO focuses on creating informative and keyword relevant title tags, meta descriptions, and website content that will increase search results and ultimately user click-through to your website.

By learning the foundations, you’ll not only understand SEO holistically, you’ll be able to optimise your own website, your content, you’ll be able to read and understand data and analytics and also cut down on agency and consultant costs.

Understanding Content Relevance

When a user searches for something like “Sydney hotels“, Google will show a list of results that are relevant to the topic of Sydney hotels.

The Google Index Robot will analyse all of the web pages its ever visited and pick out the pages that it believes are the most relevant to the keyword term ‘Sydney hotels‘.

The relevancy is determined by evaluating lots of different factors, like how your content is written, what relevant headings are on your site that match the keywords and also how your website code is written, as well as how other websites around the Internet are linking to you.

Hot Tip: It's important to understand 'relevance' because Google makes a very clear distinction between content that’s about Sydney hotels versus content relevant for other phrases like Sydney resorts, or a phrase like “Bondi getaway“.

Understanding Website Authority

One prevalent way that Google determines the authority (trustworthy-ness) of a web page or a domain (URL) is by evaluating what other websites think of you, and this can be measured through the links from other websites pointing to your website – which in SEO world is referred to as Backlinks.

Hot Tip: A web page linking to your website is almost like saying, “Hey, I trust your content enough that I’m willing to reference your page and recommend my website visitors go to your site”.

For example, Google is more likely to trust a link if it comes from a well-respected or an industry-related website, like an industry-leading blog or a nonprofit or a government agency that’s involved in your field of work.

However, a link coming from a one-month-old website that has nothing to do with you or your industry is not going to be valued nearly as much.

Understanding how important both relevance and authority are to Google will help you to both understand and improve these factors and will ultimately lead to better search engine exposure and more visitors to the pages on your websites.