SEO Masterclass : 3 Day (Holiday ) Training.

Day 1:

Looking to learn about SEO? Join me in this 3 day training, and kick start your SEO journey.

What is SEO?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of taking steps in improving a website's ranking in search engines such as Google. 

SEO is important because it increases your business visibility. Getting your website visible might seem like an easy task, but with an estimated 1.7 billion websites existing, it's not a walk in the park. That is where SEO comes in : To help you stand out from the noise.

SEO ranks your website in search engine queries. There are many search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Bing, but Google accounts for more than 90% of search queries.

When you use these search engines to ask a question, you get results based on what you type in, otherwise known as Keywords. If you were to type "egg" then "egg" is your keyword. 

Any website that has used this keyword in their website, either via their blog section or website copy, will appear in the search results. These search results are called SERPs. 

Of course it is a bit more complex than choosing one keyword and ranking first, but essentially that is how SEO works.

Choose a keyword, use it in your website and rank for it when someone searches for it.

Let's see how search engines work:

Let's say you are in the business of selling eggs and you'd like to have your page among the results from user queries. There are many more other businesses that are in the same business and want to rank high as well.  So how do you beat the competition?

The first thing is to understand how these search engines get the results once a query is typed in.

Search engines work through three primary functions:

1. Crawling: Search the Internet for content, looking over the code/content for each URL they find. This is done by robots known as crawlers or spiders and they look for new and updated content. Content can be articles, PDFs, images etc
2. Indexing: Store and organize the content found during the crawling process. Once a page is in the index, it’s in the running to be displayed as a result to relevant queries.
3. Ranking: Provide the pieces of content that will best answer a searcher's query, which means that results are ordered by most relevant to least relevant.

With this in mind, then you should know that:

Your website content should be constantly updated for you to rank. You need to be consistent in writing new content.

Your content should be adding value for the search engines to deem your content relevant to be shown .

You should determine whether your website can be found by search engines. You can do this by signing up for a free account on Google Search Console . "Google Search Console is a free service offered by Google that helps you monitor, maintain, and troubleshoot your site's presence in Google Search results. " - Google

Your content should be written for human beings and not for search engines. The primary function of search engine is providing the most useful answers to users. If your web content is clickbait or doesn't fulfil this function, then ranking your website will be difficult.

Now that you know how search engines determine what to show to users, the next step is knowing how to write this content and come up with the relevant keywords.

See you tomorrow as we look at Keywords Research. In the meantime, determine if:

1. Your content is old and outdated

2. Your website is been crawled and indexed by search engines  by signing up to Google Search Console.