SEO for the uninitiated

The first thing is first, Google changes different sections of its Search Engine Optimising algorithm (SEO) constantly. They have an entire web development team that is entirely focused on this algorithm. There are some tricks you can employ to boost your site SEO but given the fact that the algorithm is updated and changed often, it is likely more effective to follow the advice that Google themselves has released. There are many strategies that Google has outlined as effective ways to boost your SEO these are the most basic ones to start with.

Backlinking is the strategy of linking to pages on your website within the site. For example, writing an article and linking to a relevant article written on your site. This is SEO gold, it builds retention which Google loves, their most basic goal with SEO is to approve reliable and relevant sites. If your visitor retention is high, your SEO score will be high as well. It is imperative that your backlinking is relevant, not just for your visitors but for the SEO algorithm. Google as is well known has some incredibly advanced AI and it is capable of rating relevance. It is better to not link to another page if it has no relevance to the current page.

Plagiarism, is a pretty basic concept, stealing someone else’s work. Well, Google has accounted for that. They are constantly running your content against the rest of the web. It is so advanced that you can’t just change a couple of words and get away with it. Plagiarism is like cyanide to your SEO score. Google has very little patience for it, it is incredibly important you run any articles, courses, product pages, really any content at all. It is imperative that you run all your content through a reliable piece of content plagiarism-checking software to ensure that you aren’t even unintentionally copying someone else’s work.

Sitemaps are the third and in my own experience one of the most important things your site will need to launch your SEO score to new heights. Now I am fully aware that for non-web developers this will be difficult to understand. I am not going to teach you to make one, but you should definitely check out this blog post by Google about making a sitemap. At its most basic level, a sitemap is the outline for google to follow when crawling your site to create your SEO score. Now many places will say that you don’t need a sitemap if you have a website of fewer than 500 pages but I personally disagree with this sentiment. There is no reason to not create one. If you can add anything to make the crawl and scanning of your website more efficient and in-depth is a benefit.

This is obviously a very basic run of what SEO is and what you can do to raise your score. The important thing to remember is to try things, test out strategies, and fail. Yeah, you will fail, you need to. That is the best way to learn and improve. Fortunately, you can always change things on your site to improve your score. There are many different factors to building a strong site and SEO is only one of those factors. There are others like Site Health, Key-Phrases, Marketing, Site heatmaps, and behavioural data manipulation. Starting with SEO is the most conducive of immediate results though so it is the best way to start. You’ll get there eventually, don’t let the setbacks get you down, no one is an expert after their first attempt.