Search Engine Optimisation: getting started
Why it matters and how it works
Understanding Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
Understanding SEO is crucial for improving your website’s visibility and ranking in search engines like Google*. This guide will walk you through the basics of SEO and how to conduct a comprehensive health check on your website.
* Fun fact: at the time of writing, over 90% of internet searches around the world and on all subjects were on Google. The remaining 8% were on Bing, Yahoo!, Baidu and other smaller players.
How does SEO work?
Search engines are built to deliver the most relevant answers to users’ search queries. They achieve this by crawling and indexing content from across the internet. Crawling refers to the discovery of content, while indexing involves organizing and storing that content in a way that allows it to be retrieved during a search. Search engines then rank these results based on how closely a site’s content matches the search query.
Effective SEO means making your website - and all its content - easily discoverable and understandable by search engines, which in turn can improve your rankings in search results. The key principle of SEO today is authenticity - creating clear, relevant, and high-quality content that meets users' needs.
How do I improve my website SEO?
While there are technical components to SEO, there are some practical steps you can take to enhance your site’s performance and user experience at no cost, starting with a basic website health check.
How do I run a website health check?
Ensure that Google is indexing your website properly
Perform the following search on Google: site:yourwebsite.com replacing “yourwebsite.com” with your actual web address. This search will display all the pages on your site that Google has indexed.
What if your website is not showing up on Google?
If your website doesn't appear in search results, there could be several reasons:
- New website: Google may not have indexed your site yet if it’ has just launched
- Lack of external links: linking out to other websites is critical for SEO. Without external links, Google may not see your site as trustworthy
- Navigation issues: poor site structure can hinder Google’s ability to crawl and index all your pages
- Crawler blockage: certain settings or code on your website might be preventing search engines from indexing your site. this is fixable and we will cover this in a future post, but if in doubt, check with your web developer
- Google penalties: If your site has been penalized for violating Google’s guidelines, this could affect its visibility. A free tool like Sucuri SiteCheck will help quickly diagnose any issues
And what if some of my pages are indexed but not others?
This could be due to poor internal linking or site navigation. Ensure that all your key pages are accessible from your home page and that all images have alt text descriptions. Another great free tool is Google Search Console where you can submit a sitemap to guide Google on what to index.
How do I ensure my website is being indexed properly?
Proper indexing is critical for determining how your content ranks - this is influenced by three main factors:
- Content relevance: does your content meet the searcher’s intent?
- User experience: how easy is your site to use?
- Site authority: how many quality links point to your site?
How can Google Analytics help me improve my website SEO?
Google Analytics is yet another great free tool that easy to use and evaluates user experience by analysing bounce rates, dwell time and user journeys to give you great insights into your website's performance and areas for improvement.
If you need further assistance or have questions about getting started on SEO:
