SEO isn’t easy to get started with so we looked at what we would have love to have known as beginners – you joined in.
Top SEO Questions
What is SEO?
SEO stands for search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Optimization focuses on the minor modifications or even the large modifications you can do to your website to improve it, to increase the organic search traffic from the likes of Google, Bing, and other search engines around the world. SEO being modifications to your website because it’s generally quite technical, but it can be to do with your content.
It can be to do with links and it can be, when we talk about content, it can be do with to do with text, your images, your videos, but it can also be to do with content offsite. So if you are listening to this absolutely anywhere, That is SEO as well because if you look at the description, there’ll be a link back to a website, whether that’s the SEO Andy website or the actual podcast website.
(As an example) In terms of me promoting this podcast, I’ve linked to Apple Podcast Shop, Shopify, Spotify, audible, all the podcast networks, and. I’ve increased the SEO organic traffic to the podcast to promote it, and that is all seo. And of course, I’ve done lots of other stuff. So that is what SEO is. It’s to promote the organic search worth of a website.
What is the difference between Organic and Paid Search?
Now this is quite simple. Organic is free and paid. the adverts. Now the generally, the easiest way you used to be able to differentiate these is paid with the top few adverts at the top of search, and the three ones were just below that.
You used to see three or four paid, and then you’d see all three ones Now, Things have changed a little bit and you see some paid efforts at the bottom. However, Bing and Google generally mark the ads with a little sign that says, add next to it. Um, your shopping carousel generally is all ads these days.
It’s not always. but yeah, so if, if you pay for Google AdWord, that’s all paid search. The other key difference is that whilst. This will bring us onto the next question in a second. Whilst on your website you input things like metatags, you are not guaranteed to get that output on search engine results.
With paid search, you are generally guaranteed to get pretty much the advert you put in there, although there is some dynamic components or three or four different variants you can input. Now, let’s say you control that. , you’re pretty much guaranteed to get that. So that’s the difference. While it’s free, other than your time and effort of course, versus paid, which is your cost and your time and effort.
What are Meta Tags?
Metatags are things like. Meta title, the thing, the blue link that you see on Google is the best way to describe this, but you also see it in the top of your browser. So if you can visit a webpage and you see in the top of your browser, it’ll say the same.
Same as the blue link on Google and your meta description. That’s the sentence underneath the blue link. and those two generally will also get output on social media, um, unless you have what’s called an open graph tags, um, which are other meta tags where you can control distinctly things like the title and description for, Facebook and Twitter.
But if you don’t have those by default, it’ll go to the two meta tags that I’ve just described, the title. It’s just the description. You can also, um, use your featured image and control the featured image using the upper graph tags. Now, the reason these are important is that basically they’re your shop window to use and they.
Vastly increase your click through rate from search. So if a user has the right user search intent, they are more likely to click on your. website. So if they can see if they’re looking to buy a product and they can see that your pages of product from your title and your description, they are vastly more likely to click on your product than something that looks like it’s an academic paper.
And conversely, if they’re doing research into a, let’s. A series of products and to see what they do to the human body. They’re not really likely to click on your product if it’s a product because they want to see academic papers and studies, or they want to find other information about that kind of product. So you’ve got to understand user intent and what gets a conversion for your audience.
Yes, the metatags do still matter in 2023. Want to read more about this check out my recent article about it.
Do you need to know how to code, to take on SEO?
No. because if you use a CMS such as WordPress or Shopify, then everything’s built for you. And that’s even more the case with the X Works. The reality is, is these are platforms that have been built for starters.
SMEs who don’t want. Have the bother of hiring a developer at every single turn. And if you go out and hire an seo, then actually. Most of us will have had some developer experience, or we’ll be able to point you to someone who you can hire for an hour, two hours at a relatively low cost to fix a specific issue, such as I’ve several occasions come across where a WordPress template is an output in alt tags, even though you are putting it into the system.
So little things like that take absolutely no time to fix for a developer, but actually, If you haven’t got a developer on hand, it’s something that you just won’t be able to do yourself. So no, you don’t need to know how to code, but actually, if you hire someone, it’s relatively easy.
