What Is Search Engine Optimisation (SEO): A Beginners Guide

Search Engine Optimisation (or SEO for short) is the process of making webpages visible (typically to appear on top) in search engine result pages.

The websites at the top of Google, Bing, or any other search engine did not magically appear there. Someone optimised those pages to appear on top of the first page.

Search engine optimisation has evolved and grown into a highly demanded skill. Gone are the days when people set font size to zero to hide and stuff keywords. Today’s search algorithms are more advanced requiring you to up your SEO strategy.

A lot of factors come into play to rank on top. Some are mandatory while some are trivial with endless debates.

Benefits of SEO

• Free organic traffic: Unlike PPC(Pay Per Click) you don’t pay to get traffic/people to your site.
• You attract people/potential customers on autopilot
• Targeted traffic and high conversion (visitors will likely buy)
• More traffic in the long run as your website continues to rank high
• Creates trust as your website answers and helps searchers
• More brand visibility

How Search Engine Works

Search engines like Google and Bing send bots (spiders) that crawl the entire web for content.

A search bot is a piece of code that moves (crawls) around the web collecting and storing data.

When Google discovers a webpage, it crawls (analyses) it and then stores it in its database. This information storage is called indexing or indexation.

When someone searches on Google or Bing the search engines look for pages (information) in their index (database) that will most likely answer the user’s search query.

Search engine optimisation is all about creating content that will answer people’s questions and making that content found in searches.

How Does Google Find or Crawl My Website

When you create a website, it is unknown to Google or other search engines. Google can automatically discover newly created sites if they’re linked from other sites. However, you can’t bet on this, you need to submit your site to the search engines. For Google, you submit a website through Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools for Bing.

What are SERPs?

SERP stands for Search Engine Results Page. These are the pages that show up with the search results of your query. The first page is the top-ranking page with other pages getting lower and lower in rankings.

Each page shows ten website results.

About 75% of searchers won’t get past the first page, thus everyone wants to be in the first ten results.

How to Rank a Website: Understanding What Search Engines Want

Fundamentally, search engines want to serve the best and most relevant results in search pages. This means your website/webpage must help and answer a searcher’s question concisely.

Google’s main emphasis is helpful content or content that shows Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. (EEAT) (more on that later).

Google uses various ranking factors(signals) to determine which web page to show on top. While some factors are trivial, with endless debates, some are crucial like quality content, internal linking, and other referring websites (backlinks).

4-Step Approach to SEO

I will show you the steps to ranking a website higher in the SERPS. The steps are as follows:

• Keyword Research
• On-page SEO
• Off-page SEO
• Technical SEO

Keyword Research

A keyword is a word or group of words used for searching. Here are examples:

• “laptop”
• “car rental”
• “Toyota hilux rental price per day”
• “affordable iPhone for vlogging”
• “top iPhones with the best camera”

What keywords do you want to rank for? If you know your industry in and out, you should know the type of content to create based on your industry’s burning needs and questions. You should know what people need and be a problem solver.

If you’re starting, target long-term keywords which are specific and detailed e.g. “termite fumigation in [city]”, “Core i7 8GB DDR4 laptop for sale”, “what happens if you crash a rental car?” instead of short-term keywords like laptop, car rental.

Short-term keywords are more competitive than long-term keywords despite huge search volumes. You can get a significant amount of traffic by answering those often neglected long and specific queries.

You can use keyword research tools to get some keyword ideas: some are paid, and some are free. For example, you can find keywords in Google’s “People also ask” section for free. Type your main keyword in Google search and it will show you related, long-term, keyword questions people are asking.

Create relevant content around those keywords.

Here are some free keyword research tools:

• Ahrefs keyword explorer
• Keyword io for finding long-tailed keyword
• MOZ Keyword
• WordStream keyword research tool
• Google trends

On-page SEO

On page SEO focuses on the website itself; it’s content, layout and structure. Some on-page optimisations include:

Creating quality and relevant content

In the world of SEO, you have to do some writing

You need to create valuable content that answers people’s questions. Use the keywords you have gathered above to create quality content.

Content can be in the form of blog posts, comprehensive service pages, images, or videos. These will help you get found in different searches, e.g content, image and video searches of Google.

Your written content must show:

• Experience: real-world and hands-on experience.
• Expertise: your content must look like someone with knowledge in the field wrote it
• Trust: your content must be trusted. Are you showing the writer’s name and bio, citing trusted sources
• Authoritativeness: do others know the writer/website?

Off course your content doesn’t have to tick all boxes above but must be compressive enough to tackle every angle of the topic.

Elements of good content:

• Use headers: one H1, H2, H3 and so on to create subdivisions in your content
• Use short paragraph for easy readability
• Use lists where possible, .eg showing steps
• Insert images where possible
• Include stats and research data where possible
• Add a summary/conclusion at the end
• Add a FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions) section where applicable

Title & Meta Descriptions

The title and meta description are HTML elements used to describe a web page for both search engines and users. They look like this in HTML:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
	<title>Toyota Hilux Car Rental Harare</title>
	<meta name="description" content="Toyota Hilux for hire. Price $100 per day. Available in Harare">
</head>

The title is displayed at the top of a browser tab or window when someone visits your webpage. It is also the clickable headline in search engine results. The title should be descriptive, concise (usually under 60 characters), and include relevant keywords to help with search engine optimisation (SEO).

The meta description briefly summarises the page’s content, typically between 150 to 160 characters. It appears under the title in search engine results and provides users with a snapshot of what the page is about.

While it doesn’t directly impact SEO rankings, a well-written meta description can improve click-through rates by enticing users to visit the page.

Google can substitute your meta description with one that’s relevant to the user’s search.

Internal Linking

Internal linking means linking to other relevant articles/pages on your site. This signals to Google that you’re helping users learn more about something.

External Linking

You don’t know everything. Link/cite to credible and trusted websites (sources) where possible.

Image Optimisation

Add images to your content where possible. You can add real-world photos, diagrams, charts, or infographics. Describe your image clearly in the HTML alt tag.

Describe your image fully putting keywords like location, country, brand etc. You can also put keywords in your image file name: don’t stuff keywords though.

If you’re using WordPress, you can easily add the alt text in the Gutenburg/Classic editor.

Using friendly URLs

Use user-friendly URLs with keywords. Take a look below

https://yoursite.co/car-rental/harare/toyota-hilux

Try to avoid unreadable URLs with numbers and excessive query parameters like this one:

https://yoursite.co/?id=12123&pos=2

Other on-page optimisations

• Good website user interface and experience: Avoid unnecessary clutter on your website. Make sure users can find what they want without any hustle.
• Mobile-responsive website: Ensure your website is mobile-friendly

Technical SEO

Technical SEO involves methods that try to make search bots better understand and crawl a website easily.

If bots can’t access your website easily then indexing and ranking becomes difficult or never. It’s imperative you get this right. Here are some technical SEO aspects:

• Website architecture and structure: Ensure your website is easy to navigate.
• Website programming (HTML and JavaScript): Writing better code that doesn’t hinder crawling by search bots.
• Website Speed: Making sure a website loads fast, e.g fast server, using small file sizes, minification etc
• Robots.txt: Make sure nothing is blocking pages from being crawled, e.g in the robots.txt file or meta noindex tag
• XMLsitemaps: Create an XML sitemaps to make search engines find your pages easily
• Website security (SSL): Using https instead of http
• Page Redirects: Using correct 301 redirects
• Crawl budgets: Make sure search engines aren’t crawling irrelevant pages/URLs, e.g feed pages. Remove useless pages from being crawled by Google.
• Breadcrumbs: Navigational hierarchy of a page, e.g Home > Car Rental > Pickups > Toyota Hilux
• Featured Snippets: Special result displays that appear in searches, e.g images, star ratings, etc. These can require structured data.

Off-page SEO

Off-page SEO is one of the most challenging parts of SEO as it mostly involves external factors that enable your site to rank higher. You have to build what are called backlinks: websites linking to your website.

To verify if your site is trustworthy Google will seek validation from other websites that link to yours. If it sees that most websites are referring to a particular web page, it will see it as valuable and trusted and pushes it to the top.

Some off-page SEO techniques include:

• Guest blogging on other people’s sites and link to your website.
• Reaching out to other websites/people to link to your website
• Sharing content on various platforms; social media, forums, Quora, Slideshare etc
• Creating linkable assets like long-form content guides, research-based articles, and online tools
• Submitting your website to directory pages, Google business, Yelp, Zim Yellow pages etc
• Broken link building where you reach out to writers/bloggers with a replacement link to replace a non-functional link in their article.

Other SEO Types

Local SEO

Local SEO involves ranking websites in local areas like cities, towns or suburbs. You do this by using local area names and keywords like “near me” in the title, meta descriptions, and page content. Here are examples:

• Toyota Hilux for Hire in Harare
• Pest control services near me

In addition, use country-code domains like .co.zw, and .uk to show in local searches – they’re much easier to optimise than global domains like .com, and .org. When you search for something on Google, Google tries to show local websites first and then expands its area of search.

Submit your website to Google My Business. Put your business details there like name, address, photos, and what you do. Ask your existing clients to submit their reviews on your Business Listing to boost its ranking.

Summary

SEO can be a game changer to your business as it attracts targeted traffic that is more likely to convert(buy). You optimise once and reap the benefits in the long run

FAQs

How long does it to rank a website

Phew…this is a tricky question because many factors come into play for a website to rank on topp. Factors like your budget, commitment, and changing algorithms can determine the success of your SEO.

SEO can take 3-6 months to see results depending on the level of competition and effort. It may even take a year in some cases.

Is SEO dead?

With the inception of ChatGPT, there has been a significant decline in search traffic. However, SEO is not dead and continues to bring traffic to websites. You just need to evolve with the ever-changing landscape, e.g., AI-based results, to get significant results.

Should I Write Content for Search engines or for people?

There’s a debate about whether to write for people or search engines. Writing for search engines means all your focus is primarily on getting to the top regardless of whether you’re providing something useful.

This can lead to shady SEO techniques like link buying, keyword stuffing, bulk article creation etc. This can get you in trouble.

I encourage you to write for people and then optimise the content to rank higher. This also aligns with Google’s emphasis on helpful content (EEAT).