SEO or Search Engine Optimisation is a phrase you’ll hear about when looking at websites (or anything online really). SEO is used to make sure your site appears in front of the right people and is categorised properly by search engines. For example if your website is about Star Wars you want to make sure that or something related to it appears as one of your Keywords. So this week’s article is going to look at why SEO and Keywords are important along with a couple of tips.
The Wild West of SEO
SEO and Keywords date back to the early days of the internet. They allow for search engines to comb through and find sites relevant to what the user needs. People used to do all sorts of shady things to hide the keywords and trick people into clicking on the site. They’d hide it in the background, behind pop ups in the meta data among other sneaky ways. As time has gone on search engines have gotten more sophisticated and look at more than just the keywords they look at the context also.
Let’s go back to the Star Wars example for a second to illustrate the point. Say your website has a page about Luke Skywalker. Back in the day people would make sure that the phrase “Luke Skywalker” appeared repeatedly even if didn’t make a lot of sense. Instead of “His father is Darth Vader” it would be “Luke Skywalker is the son of Darth Vader”. Now that doesn’t seem so bad, but when it replaces he, his or they then it becomes annoying. The reason for this was that search engines would look for how many times the phrase appeared on the page. The more times it did, well that clearly meant your page was better. This meant you got more clicks and therefore, rose to the top of searches.
Now though, if you were to try and pull that trick search engines actively push you down for trying to game the system in such a way. You also have to use it in ways that make sense grammatically as well. Another thing that search engines look for is if you are using phrases associated with your keyword. An article about Luke that doesn’t mention Lightsaber’s, Jedi, Darth Vader, etc. isn’t going to get very far.
Do we still need it?
Some people say that keywords and SEO is outdated and you just need to use Google Ads to get your site seen. I don’t buy into that, for the simple fact that as part of the Ad you have to have keywords and choose a field you want to appear in. That means you have to spend time researching the correct wording. This then begs the question if you’re going to do the work for the ad why not give your site a boost as well?
In my experience I just ignore or quickly pass over the ads. If I type in Deliveroo to my search engine and the first thing that pops up is a paid ad for Just Eat I’m just going to scroll down to the one I actually want. So ads are by no means a guarantee. They help, but they work best with a site that uses SEO and Keywords well.
Often this advice is given by people who own companies that have funds to put into those kinds of campaigns. If you’re a small business whose funds are tight, then this isn’t really a practical solution. There is the old adage you have to spend money to make money but in certain situations that’s not practical. If you have strong SEO to begin with you can build your consumer base and bring in funds to buy ads.
To Sum Up
In short, SEO is an important part of your website. Finding the right words and balance is one of the trickier parts of the whole process, but it is worth the effort. Now if you need some more pointers to get it up to a good standard then you’re in luck! Next week’s article has some useful tips on how to build and get the best SEO possible. So check back in next week on our Blog page. We publish articles every week so it’s worthwhile following us on Facebook or checking back in with us regularly.
If you want more articles like this one then why don’t you check out our Blog page? We publish articles every week so it’s worthwhile following us on Facebook, Twitter or checking back in with us regularly.
