SEO 101

The problem with SEO is that it's always moving. It can feel like it's moving at the speed of light and that Google updates are constantly happening. It also feels like every new update affects your carefully, painstakingly crafted SEO, making it look and feel as if your hard-earned traffic is falling off a cliff.

So why does the Algorithm keep changing?

When you've spent all your time doing the necessary Alt Text (for images), optimising your images (WebP is the best format), checking your links work and making sure your pages are being crawled by the Google Bots, it can be heartbreaking, and it can feel exhausting trying to keep up.

So, why do the search engines constantly update their algorithm and seemingly focus on different things?

The algorithm changes because Google is always thinking about its customers, much as we all should be. They exisit to make it easier for people using the engines to find your content.

For example, back in 2020, they launched what they called the 'Helpful Content' update. This was designed to help people using the search engines.

People generally use search engines in one of two ways:

1. Searching for something specific that they already have some information about.

2. Asking questions - how someone starts to research a new need, want or interest.

The Helpful Content Update focussed on how to help these people get to what they are looking for more quickly and your SEO is crucial in how Google finds and assesses your content as a match for the user's search.

This meant that the websites that were seen as the best at answering questions were the ones than actually did answer that question. A simple way to do this is to create either content on a page or a blogs that lead with a question you know your customers might be asking.

For example, a blog entitled 'How to create a site that gets found on Google.' or 'Why is my site not ranking on Google'.

Google is not your enemy

First thing to remember is that Google is not your enemy, even though it feels like it sometimes. As long as you are prepared to read up on updates and work out what it is that Google wants to see from your site, you're in the best possible place. There are a lot of blogs that you can follow about updates and their schedule, so you can try to get a bit ahead of the game.

Yes, it means you have to work harder than you'd like to stay in the race for rankings, but you wouldn't open a shop and expect everyone to still be excited when you still have the same things in the window a year after you opened.

If you're lazy with your updates, posts and refining your SEO, Google WILL notice. It has been set up for some time now to recognise when pages haven't been updated for a while and when there haven't been any new posts. You have to keep your content fresh and properly optimised in order to grab attention.

Google Console crawls indexed pages (pages that you have directed Google to look at) on a regular basis. It stores a record of what it saw on the last visit and then compares the content against what it sees the next time it visits your pages.

HOWEVER, this doesn't mean just going into your site and changing a few words or writing a blog once in a blue moon. You need to build time into your schedule for website maintenance or get someone to do it for you.

SEO is a painstaking and fiddly business and to get your SEO Ranking up to 100%, you need to stay on top of it.

This blog will endeavour to update any readers on new Google updates and the increasing use of AI in Search Engine algorithms that affect ranking.

What are the most important SEO Elements?

In another blog, I will outline the more complicated elements of SEO and explain more how they all interconnect.

For now, if you're just getting your SEO underway, these are the most important elements to get right first, then you can build on the rest.

1. Use plain English as much as possible. Search Engines use various tools to measure this, but it has become more important since AI has appeared on the scene. Most AI operates on a program designed to assess the ease of reading. There are many apps that you can use to help you with this, but the basic rules are:

   1. Try to keep sentences below 18 words.

   2. Try to keep sylables to a minimum.

   Now, this can be a difficult thing to do while still creating an engaging personality, but you should always consider that people start doing research by asking really very basic and broad questions. Start your pages with as much plain English as you can. The top of each page is the part that Google reads first. If your customer is interested in what you are offering, they will read on and that's where you can get creative.

2. Use the correct Heading and Paragraph architecture.

   1. Google reads content in this order: H1, H2, H3, then all other headings. You can adjust the headings you are using in text editor.

   2. Generally, unless you have a VERY specialised website, you only need to use 1 x H1 heading per page, 2 x H2 per page. Any other subheadings should be H3.

   3. After that, you can just get on with writing whatever you like in Paragraph settings.

3. Site Speed.

   This is a BIG one. It's generally images, videos and other graphic elements (especially moving ones) that cause the main problems. However, you also need to use a good caching system. This is something that you can get apps for, but a lot of good website platforms have them built in. Google speed ranking is a big factor in where your pages appear on search pages.

   1. Convert your images, especially large ones, into WebP format if your website platform allows it. WebP is a format that was developed by Google, so it naturally prioritises these images, not least because it reduces the size of JPGs (the next smallest image format) by over 25%. In an image-heavy website, this is extremely important.

   2. Install and configure a caching system that allows your images to do what's called 'Lazy-Load'. This delays the loading of images that are further down the page or on secondary pages that are of less importance. If you don't have this, search engines will attempt to load all the images at the same time, regardless of where they are on the website. This creates a massive bottleneck and your site will run extremely slowly.

4. Alt Text.

   Alt Text is a written description of an image on your website. This is important, because, currently, Google does not have eyes. It has no idea what the image is of unless you tell it. You could have a picture of a beautiful landscape, but if you name the file '200 Pink Elephants', then Google is going to think the image is about Pink Elephants and won't bring up your image in a search for 'Beautiful Landscape'. This is an easy, if repetitive, task to enrich your SEO, especially when the site is very image-heavy.

   
   

   by Esther Goldsby for Carolina Jimenez

   
   
   
   

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