Good SEO is 90% Common Sense

Image courtesy of SEOplanteIn the course of our business as an online digital marketing services company, we talk to a lot of business owners who are confused about Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). In fact increasingly, particularly over the last 6 months or so, we have had more conversations about SEO than ever before.

SEO is high on the marketing agenda for businesses, but unfortunately most business owners don’t really know where to start. They feel like they need to spin a dice in a game of chance in which they don’t understand the rules!

Search Engine Optimisation has been around as long as the Internet or as least as long as there have been search engines to help people search the World Wide Web.

In the early days, search engines were pretty crude tools and as such, smart online marketeers found ways to exploit them and turn the results of searches in their favour. But over time,the top search engines have become more refined and a whole lot smarter. That’s good for everyone who searches online, but for the business owner who want their website to work harder for them it seems that there is more mystery around Search Engine Optimisation than ever before.

It is true that SEO is a huge subject and there is a lot you can do to market your website better, but SEO needn’t be complicated. Of course, there are many technical elements to optimising a website, but that doesn’t mean SEO is a black art which most people cannot understand. Many SEO agencies will tell you they have the recipe for the secret sauce, but we believe they are wrong.

The truth is that good SEO is 90% common sense.

• It starts with understanding the needs of people looking for your products and services.
• It continues with understanding the words or phrases that those people would most commonly use to search for your ‘stuff’.

And it ends, with making sure the content (words, images, video etc) on the pages of your website, is relevant to your customer, because it is written for your customer.

Yes, that is summarising and simplifying the process of Search Engine Optimisation, but that is where you need to start.

Watch out for a series of blog posts on Search Engine Optimisation. These will be articles covering the basics of SEO that every website owner should be following to optimise the pages of their website – for their customers first. So, if SEO in plain English is what you need, then make sure you subscribe to our blog updates or watch out for them via social media. If there are particular questions you have then please send an email to seo@crackingmedia.com and we will do our best to answer you.