Before we get started, let’s familiarise ourselves with SEO. The acronym SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation. But to avoid confusion, it’s common to say SEO and Search Engine Optimisation interchangeably. In a nutshell, SEO is concerned with improving the appearance, structure and accessibility of your website so that it can be found more easily in search engine results pages (SERPs). To put it simply, the higher you raise your website’s position in the organic search results, the more likely you are going to draw a high-value audience to your website.

Organic search positions are determined by many factors but right from the start the most two important factors you will want to focus on are:
1. How compelling the content of your website is. 2. How relevant the website is to what people are searching for.
For example, if someone is searching for information on how to apply for a job in the United States, they probably won’t be very interested in a website about plastic surgery in Costa Rica. And vice versa. What people are really looking for when they type in a search phrase into a search engine is exactly what they want—specifically, the most relevant result that appears in the first few organic results of their search. This is true no matter what the subject of the search is. Organic rankings are determined by an algorithm that measures how "relevant" and how "compelling" each website is in response to a specific search query.
The first step toward accomplishing this goal is to know what the major search engines consider to be important factors in determining a site's ranking. Search engine ranking factors are usually expressed as words or phrases that indicate what the search engine considers to be relevant and important about a website. These ranking factors are typically discovered through extensive testing. However, there are several well-known ranking factors used by almost all the search engines, including the number of times a particular word or phrase appears on a page, how recently it appeared, and the “closeness” of a match between the actual text on a page and the text a search engine would like to see on that page.

Other major factors considered by search engines are the type of website (e.g., commercial vs. informational), the popularity of a website, the “age” of the website, whether or not the website is updated regularly, the number of links leading away from the website, the “quality” of those links, and many other factors. In general, the more relevant and important factors a search engine has for a web page, the higher the ranking of that web page in the search results.
Consequently, a lot of money can be made (and saved) by learning the basics of how to properly optimise your website. One of the first steps to a successful SEO campaign is to have a clear understanding of what aspects of your site need to be optimised and why.
SEO is tough. In fact, it’s quite possibly one of the hardest things a website owner can do to their site. Google, which has historically dominated the online search engine market and has been the main focus of most SEO efforts, is constantly changing the rules. But that doesn’t mean it’s not worth it. Careful consideration can go a long way towards making sure you’re giving your site the best chance at achieving success in the organic listings. However, with an ever-changing and expanding Internet comes new challenges every day, and there are no guarantees your site will attract as much traffic as you hope.
That’s why here at Cairns SEO Agency we consider it so important to keep up-to-date with these changes and trends, always focusing on optimising your content for search engines but also your users and community as well. Managing your SEO is more important than ever if you want your website to compete in the modern marketing and publishing environment. There are so many tactics out there that it can become difficult to know where to start.
So there you have it, what SEO is and why it is important for your website. If you’re looking for a good place to start, contact us now for your Free Audit.
After that figure out exactly what your goals are and make your own personalised plan. Now that you understand the basic concepts you can take off in whichever direction you please. The world of SEO is big and scary at first but once you get started even on the basics there is a strong chance that SEO could help your business increase traffic, rankings and profits.
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