In basic terms, SEO – short for Search Engine Optimisation is all about optimising your website to rank higher on search engines such as Google,Bing and Duck-Duck-Go.
These search engines will crawl using “robots”, essentially visiting each page of your website that it can find and then performing some tests to determine how well it should rank – how high in the search results this page will appear for each search query.
As I’ve talked about what SEO is in previous blog posts, I won’t go into too much detail about the concepts here. Instead, you may find this article of interest.
This may sound very complicated, but it doesn’t have to be. You can measure the effectiveness of your SEO using a number of tools available online.
Two types of SEO
Search engines rank each individual web page based on a number of different criteria – which can be divided into one of two groups. Technical SEO or Content SEO.
It’s more fruitful to focus your efforts on getting both of these aspects of SEO to a good standard, rather than focusing on one area and completely neglecting the other. An optimal combination of both will set your page up for the best possible chance to appear high in the search rankings.
Technical SEO
The time it takes to load your page. How each element appears to a mobile user. Delivering resources in an efficient way. Image sizes being the correct resolution for the screen they are being viewed on.
These are all key factors considered by robots when it comes to deciding where to rank your web page in search results listings.
The full list of factors is far too long to write down here, but you can diagnose your website’s Technical SEO using Google Chrome’s Lighthouse
Lighthouse is a tool which performs a similar analysis to the crawling robots search engines use. It analyses many criteria, including the ones mentioned above, to determine how accessible, mobile-friendly, fast and optimised your page is.
After running a scan on your page, you should see a screen like below.
On this screen, you are able to see exactly what factors are “weighing your page down”, and how to fix them.
Google focuses on mobile-first, however lighthouse allows you to scan your page from both a mobile and a desktop point of view. The differences being how much content is shown on the screen at once, how quick the expected connection will be and how large the images should be.
Fixing your technical SEO is mostly a job for your website developer. Very often, technical SEO issues can only be fixed in the code side of things, though some issues such as image sizing could be solved by just uploading optimal images to replace the (usually) too large ones.
Content SEO
Relevant keyword usage within the first two paragraphs. Correctly assigning a H1 heading, title and page description. Providing relevant and non-spammy content to your users. Being linked to by other popular websites (Backlinks). These are the key factors of Content SEO.
Be consistent with writing and providing content. Focus on Long-Tail content which is always relevant, not tied to any specific limited one time event or product.
There are a few more tools which I recommend for checking your Content SEO effectiveness.
Google search console allows you to see the performance of your web page in comparison with real search terms that people have used. Optimising towards the keywords which prove to get you clicks can be an effective approach.
Pulno can effectively judge the effectiveness of backlinks towards your website rankings. Enter your site’s URL and you can see which sites are linking to your pages, the “Pulno power” of each of those sites, and your own websites power. Beware though, there can be a long delay for this tool to update. Check the “last checked”
What Sleekweb can do for your SEO
- Affordable consultancy and analysis of your site
- Full website development includes SEO set up with 100% lighthouse scores
- Fast hosting from £6 per month or £60 per year