1. What does SEO stand for and what does it mean?

Search Engine Optimisation. This is the practice of getting the pages of your website ranking for search terms relevant to your business. There are many elements to SEO that need to be considered in order to make your pages rank, it’s not just about the keywords.

2. What are the most important things to get right for SEO?

There are many factors to get right in order to carry out SEO effectively.
However, the five key areas to get right are:

• Well written and accurate content – get in enough keywords in key areas to make a page relevant but don’t go over the top! Just write naturally
• Make sure your website is easy to crawl – less gimmicks and more quality content will make it easier for Google to scan your page. If there are multiple plugins to make a page look ‘hi-tech’ the harder it is for the Google crawl bots to scan
• Make sure you get your keywords in the title tags – this is the first place Google will look when checking for relevancy
• Make sure your website is working properly – from page load times to being mobile friendly, it has never been more important for your website to be technically accurate
• Your site must be easy to navigate – the structure of your site is high on Google’s priority list. Make sure there are no dead-ends

3. Does your search engine ranking effect your search engine advertising?

Absolutely! By having a strong SEO strategy, you will stand more of a chance of your search engine ads being seen as the pages the ads click through to will be more relevant. You will also save yourself money as the better your site’s quality score, the cheaper your pay per click.

4. What is on-site SEO?

On-site SEO is making sure that your site is optimised from a technical point of view. Web page content is normally separated from onsite SEO in an SEO strategy due to the amount of planning and execution involved. On-site SEO includes ensuring your web pages load up quickly, the robots.txt is implemented and all metadata is accurate.

5. What is local SEO?

Local SEO is where you concentrate on making your address prominent on your website in order to appear on location specific searches (e.g. optician in Birmingham). It also involves taking advantage of search engines’ location services, in particular claiming your Google My Business account and map pin.

6. What is robots.txt and why is it important?

Robots.txt is the code on a website that instructs search engines how to crawl your site. It is essential that this is present on any page you want to be ranked for any of your key search terms.

7. What are backlinks?

If you have a link on another site to a page on your website, then that page has a backlink to it. Likewise, if you link to another site from your webpage, then you are giving that site a backlink. Backlinks are one of the ways in which Google measures how good a source of information a website is. If you have more links from trusted sources, the more likely Google will see you as a good source of information for your keywords.

Backlinks do fluctuate in importance, but it is always best to have an arsenal of backlinks from sites with good quality scores. Once you have identified suitable websites, you can check their score using various online tools.

8. Is metadata still important?

Not all metadata will help your pages rank, but it is the shop window to your site, and therefore your business, in search engines. The listing you see on a search engine is taken from the meta title and meta description associated with that particular web page. The rest of your SEO strategy will get you ranking.

9. What is https and does it affect SEO?

HTTPS indicates that a site is secure and can collate a person’s details in a secure way by having security certificates installed. This is essential if you are collecting customer details of any sort. It can also make your site run faster than having an HTTP site so this will have a positive effect on your rankings.

10. Is there software that can help me with my SEO strategy?

At FTW Digital we can provide a mix of our tried and tested software, third party tools and our expert support to help you form and execute your SEO strategy. Our software will analyse your site, suggest ideas for keywords and content, and show you how you compete in the search space against your competitors. It will also help present clear and concise reporting.