HOW TO CHOOSE AN SEO COMPANY FOR YOUR WEBSITE
Make sure you’re fully informed so that you can get the most benefit!

SEO stands for search engine optimisation. SEO is the art of getting Google to show people your website. An SEO team optimises websites according to what we think Google considers when it determines the rankings (the order that web pages are shown) for a specific keyword.

A successful SEO campaign boosts both your brand awareness and sales (online and in store) by ensuring that people who are looking to buy your product or service are aware that you sell it and consider you as an option. It is essentially a method of marketing directly to people who already want to buy your product.

A keyword or key phrase is, in an SEO context, anything that people search for on Google. One of the first steps in SEO is to identify commonly searched keywords that are relevant to your business (i.e. are searched by people who are likely to be interested in your product or service). These are the terms that you want to rank highly for.

When you are thinking about which keywords to target you should start by trying to think of what people who want to search for your website will look for – typically these searches will relate to your products or services.

Search engines such as Google gain users by providing people with access to the information they are looking for. This means that Google wants to make sure that relevant, informative pages that give people the answers they are looking for, show up at the top of search rankings. You climb the rankings by making modifications to your pages that indicate to Google that your page is relevant, informative and useful for specific keywords.

Keyword frequency is the total number of times the keyword or phrase appears on a given web page. In comparison, keyword density is the percentage of times that keyword, or phrase appears on the page. Keywords are important because Google uses them to help connect content to search results.

In Australia (and most of the rest of the world) Google has a virtual monopoly as a search engine. Here their market share typically hovers around 95% with the remainder split between a number of other engines such as Bing and Yahoo. Bing, the next biggest search engine, has about 3-4% market share. This means that optimising websites for Google pays by far the largest dividends when the engines differ in their algorithms, and it is the most important one to rank on by far.

Organic SEO defines a situation when a website is able to naturally obtain a high organic placement of a search engine result without paying for an algorithm-driven boost on that search engine platform. These results can be achieved with our SEO services to perform technical and structural changes on your website along with regular content updates.

PPC, short for pay-per-click advertising, is an online marketing scheme where advertisers pay a fee every time one of their ads are clicked. An effective PPC campaign requires researching and selecting the right key words to effectively organise campaigns and ad-groups.

A backlink, sometimes known as an inbound or incoming link, is when one website links to another. Having lots of backlinks greatly benefits you as it indicates that lots of other websites are talking about your site and this in turn, improves your search rank in Google. Think of it like a vote of confidence or a recommendation to go visit your website. Natural links that flow with interesting content, in other words contextual backlinks, work best. Having high-quality backlinks on reputable websites help to boost your brand exposing your website to a larger share of the market.

Internal links are hyperlinks within the same domain or website that connects you to different web pages. Inversely, external links or outbound links take you to other websites. Any clickable text with a link and label, typically underlined blue, is known as anchor text. When important key words are featured in anchor text, it improves search engine ranking. But be careful and genuine when linking as spammy links or links placed out of context will reduce your ranking.

A landing page is the front-page people see when they enter your website or a particular section of your site.

Any text or other media that is identical or very similar within or across different domains.

Having a clearly structured website makes it easier to rank in search engines. A SEO friendly URL has an appropriate length and avoids unnecessary keywords and characters. The aim is to always use your keywords and keep your URLs as short as possible without losing the meaning. Different words should be separated using hyphens to make it easier to read. Websites that maintain a consistent sitewide HTML structure are ideal.

Domain extensions are the suffixes of a website domain name. The little ending bit such as .com, .edu, .net, .gov and so forth. Country based domain extensions like .au (Australia) are great for local businesses or other blogs associated with that location.

Googlebot is the named used for Google’s web page crawlers.

In SEO, crawling is when a robot surfs the web to categorise and analyse websites. As it does this, the robots systematically index the words and contents of the website and pages, so it can later be retrieved as search results.

A robots.txt file communicates with search engine robots about how to crawl a website. This file contains crawl instructions indicating which web-crawling software crawls parts of a website, allowing or disallowing certain types of behaviour.

Only web pages that are indexed by Googlebot appear as search results in Google. The easiest way to check if your website, or if any other pages are indexed on Google is to use its search engine. Start by typing site: (your URL) into the search bar. Listed results will indicate whether your domain is indexed, and all any separate indexed web pages will also be listed if applicable. Alternatively, Google has great webmaster tools, now known as Google search console. Simple add your website on their dashboard, verify ownership of your site and you can then view lots of interesting information including the index status on the side tab.

Websites that appear more attractive on Google get more clicks. When Google displays search results, web page titles along with short summaries are listed to describe a websites content. These little snippets of summarised text are meta tags. Unique titles and meta descriptions that use keywords work best. The meta description will provide a short summary of the content on that web page. Having an outstanding concise summary will attract clicks.

CTR refers to your click through rate. It is calculated by dividing the number of times a link appears on a search engine result page by the number of times a visitor clicks and visits that website. A high CTR in any search engine, especially Google, means you get more traffic to your website. People are more likely to click on your links when it is interesting. To help boost your CTR, write interesting headings.

Bounce rate is the number of visitors who view a website for them to leave after only viewing one web page. It is expressed as a percentage of total visitors who visit the site and leave before continuing on to view other web pages.

Pogo sticking is when a user clicks quickly returns to the search results to visit a different page after clicking your search result. Although this behaviour is only categorised as pogo sticking if a user leaves a page within the first five seconds of visiting a web page. Doing so indicates dissatisfaction and Google can start to penalise you for this if it happens frequently. High quality content and great web design will keep people on your sites for longer.

People input diverse search results and terms in Google. Google trends is a useful tool to visualise and gather data on the popularity and trends of search terms or queries. Popular search words can be used to highlight shifts in popular culture or breaking news stories.

WordPress is a simple and powerful, free open-source tool to create and manage a blog. You can create a variety of websites with WordPress including online eCommerce stores. This tool is used by businesses and individual creators alike.

Content marketing relates to any marketing practice that targets an online audience to increase brand visibility by posting or sharing material to promote a brand, business, product or service.

Whenever you write an article for another website or blog, in exchange for a link to your website, you are guest posting. These links are commonly found in an author’s bio. If your post is high quality, and is published on a website with strong engagement, you can increase your following. Engagement via social media or blog comments will promote this growth.

A site map is a list of pages on a website. A HTML sitemap helps visitors find important pages on your website with a structured list. Additionally, an XML sitemap document can be written for search engine spiders which quickly extract important site information for search engine results.

A websites domain authority refers to its search engine ranking score. A high domain authority indicates quality information and prestige. Scores for domain authority are listen on a logarithmic scale from 0 to 100; meaning that the higher you rank, the harder it is to improve your score. For your website to succeed, a similar or better domain authority rank, compared to competitor websites, will still reap worthwhile results.