What is SEO? A Beginners Guide to SEO

Introduction

The phrase SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation. In short, this is optimising your website to appear higher in Google search results. Whether you're a business owner, a content creator, or simply curious about how websites climb to the top of search engine rankings, this article is a great starting point.

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Why is SEO Important?

Do you use Google? Of course, you do. Everyone who uses the internet uses Google. SEO (or Search Engine Optimisation) is a term that describes the fight to appear higher Google's organic rankings. However, the aim of SEO is not necessarily to achieve the top spot. Instead, it is about driving relevant website traffic from Google search results to your website.

The battle for companies to appear high in Google rankings is hard-fought, especially given that there are more websites than people! But think about that for a second. How does Google decide what website to show for a particular search query with billions of websites? Simply having a website won't cut it. You need an array of factors to go in your favour to have any chance of ranking well. The strange part about SEO is that nobody (probably not even Google) knows which elements exactly constitute the complete 'algorithm', which dictates which sites rank for search queries. Even worse, Google is constantly updating this algorithm. Marketers fear nothing more than the latest Google 'Panda' update or 'Penguin' tweak (true story, Google usually names algorithm updates after animals).

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Key SEO Elements

However, there are some known fundamental elements to SEO, the basics of your site that you must do right to start to have a hope of a decent rank for your chosen keywords. Some of these aspects include: clean site code, indexing with Google, schema markup, relevant metadata and good quality onsite content, quality backlinks, amongst other things.

These algorithm basic factors can be broken down into three core elements:

• Technical SEO (how well your site is made and optimised), including the metadata. More recently, Google introduced the 'Core Web Vitals' to measure this.
• Content - without quality, relevant content, how will Google know what to show people in search results?
• Backlinks - this is a web page that links to a page on your website. Google sees this as a vote of confidence from another site that your website is credible or authoritative.

It should be noted, this is the fundamental basics of what is essential, and each of the above topics could be expanded upon in a book by itself, not to mention thousands of other ranking factors Google uses.

The good news is that every website hand-crafted by Paddle Creative will be a tick in the box from a technical SEO perspective. We offer a range of services to cover all bases of SEO to help your site rank, just like we have for many other websites. Fundamentally, increasing traffic from Google will likely see a growth in your business.

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Conclusion

The bottom line is, if you want to appear high in Google search results, doing the basics right is just the starting point. SEO is a war of attrition, and it takes time and expertise. But you don't need to slog away at it. Let Paddle Creative do it for you, take on the SEO challenge for you and help you gain traction. Are you interested in Paddle Creative SEO? Get in touch and find out more.
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Another option that will allow you to jump the queue is Google Adwords Pay-Per-Click marketing. Discover more about how you can harness the power of PPC here

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