Demystifying SEO

Search Engine Optimisation – usually abbreviated to SEO – is a great digital marketing tool. It's a way you can bump your website further up the search engine results, but it needs to be handled with care. Even people who think they have a pretty good understanding of SEO can get it badly wrong.

SEO boosts the visibility of your site, allowing more people to discover you. Without SEO, you're pretty much handing your trade over to your competitors.

So how does it work? Well, search engine companies take your website pages and grade them based on a number of factors. It shouldn't faze you but Google uses over two hundred ranking factors in its grading algorithm. We'll just look at the ones which count the most.

The biggest is keywords. Keywords are words which are relevant to the terms people might be searching on. Let's take an example. Say you own a shop which sells fitness equipment. You'd want to think about all the words and phrases people might use when looking for fitness equipment – sport, fitness, exercise, gym, sports equipment, fitness equipment. Then you'd want to make sure they were well scattered throughout your pages, so the search engines would pick up on them.

As well as including them in your content, putting keywords in the titles and headers of your website will make a big difference.

Keywords make you sound like an authority on your subject, which is what search engines want. Without some smart use of keywords, it will be hard for people to find you. Include too many – known as 'keyword stuffing' – and you can be penalised by search engine companies.

Keyword stuffing is the deliberate overuse of keywords in order to skew search results. Remember, the search engine algorithms know every trick in the book, so keyword stuffing is a pointless exercise.

The likes of Google and Bing also use link analysis, which checks how many other pages link to the page in question. If lots of other sites have referenced your pages, it makes your site seem more relevant. As with keyword stuffing, however, an unreasonably high number of links will raise suspicion.

In order to get your SEO spot on, you need to do your homework and be careful in how you handle it. Alternatively, you could think about outsourcing your website content to a specialist agency.