What is SEO?

SEO, or Search Engine Optimisation, can seem a daunting and mysterious process. Allow Seven Stars to shed some light on just how SEO works, and how it can work for you. By implementing an intelligent SEO strategy for your website, Seven Stars can help your business achieve outstanding results.

Just what is SEO?

SEO is the process of achieving high rankings in organic (natural) search engine results for a specified key word or phrase. The theory behind this is that the higher a website appears for this word or phrase, the more likely a search engine user is likely to click on it. Search engine visits are incredibly valuable, as they offer targeted, focused traffic that is searching directly for the product or service a website offers. SEO can be divided into Onsite SEO and Offsite SEO. Both are as fundamental as each other; focusing on one aspect alone will have little effect on your website rankings.

What exactly do you mean by organic results?

Search engine results pages (SERPs) display two types of results: organic, and paid. Organic results are usually more trusted by users, due to the fact that these rankings cannot simply be bought: they tend to represent more reputable websites, with brand equity playing a hugely important role in customer decision-making.

Paid results are generally those which use Pay Per Click (PPC) marketing to achieve rankings alongside organic rankings. PPC uses a defined budget to offer a listing on a SERP for a given key word or phrase - but once this budget is gone, then so is the website’s visibility.

This screenshot shows the layout of organic and paid search results. Those in the green area are organic, achieved through SEO. Those in the orange area are paid or ‘sponsored’ results, which are gained with PPC.

How does SEO actually work?

SEO is concerned with three concepts: relevance, trust and authority.

Relevance

The more relevant a page is to a specified key word or phrase, the higher it will rank for that word or phrase. The relevance of a website is determined by a number of factors including keyword density and backlink anchortext, amongst other things.

Trust

Trust is given by search engines to web pages which can be shown to be a trusted source. Trust can be gained in many ways, including having an established website (usually around 10 years), having quality external links pointing toward the website (see link building), and updating your pages frequently with relevant website copywriting.

Authority

Authority is seen as an indicator of the quality of a web page. It is established in a variety of ways, including age, importance and overall relevance. Authority is usually given to industry leaders, world-class education establishments and leading experts in a particular field. Examples of authority websites include the BBC, Wikipedia and the W3C. Often, authority websites will dominate the search engine rankings for a specific key word or phrase.

What makes one website rank higher than another?

Major search engines, such as Google, Yahoo! and Bing, have complex algorithms which calculate just how ‘optimised’ a website or individual page is for a specific key word or phrase. Relevancy, trust and authority all play a major role in search engine rankings too. In order to establish these, search engines employ complex algorithms to rank a website. The Google algorithm alone has over 200 ways of ranking a page! In order to achieve high rankings, it is vital to fulfil as many of these ranking criteria as possible.

Some of these criteria are more important to SEO than others. It is vital to understand just which parts of the algorithms hold the most importance, as this can make the difference between success and failure.

As you can see, SEO is incredibly detailed and there are many factors which must be considered in order to successfully achieve high organic rankings. We deal with all of these factors every day and can offer effective SEO solutions, tailored to your business’ unique requirements, which can increase your rankings, leads, sales and profits. To request a free SEO report for your website, or to find out more about my SEO work, please contact us.