It is the job of an SEO technician to ensure a client’s website is kept updated with the latest SEO techniques. SEO stands for “search engine optimisation”, and its main purpose is to help make your brand and website visible to the right customer.
Nowadays, most organisations use the Internet as an indispensable tool in growing their brand. There is a range of ways within the digital marketing space to help a brand become visible, such as social media marketing and video marketing.
However, if your brand is to stand out from its competitors, it is crucial that you have impactful SEO efforts underway. There are four main pillars that make up SEO – so, let’s consider what they are.
What are the basics of SEO?
Before we jump into the four pillars of SEO, let’s talk a little about the basics of SEO. SEO is there to help make your website as visible as it can be in the rankings of the search engine titans such as Google and Bing.
Now, these search engines send out “web crawlers”, aka bots, to index websites. The best websites that fit the users’ requests are then listed on the front pages of the search engine under specific keywords and phrases. The algorithms that decide which page is best suited for a certain key phrase are quite complicated. This is why it is important you use the right key phrases and keep updating your website with the latest SEO techniques.
To make sure your SEO is always up to scratch, it is vital that you refer back to the four pillars of SEO. These are the foundations that help build a strong website. We are going to discuss each of these pillars in detail. They are:
- Technical SEO
- Content creation
- On-site SEO
- Off-site SEO
If you are ready to make your brand’s website and all-round online presence the best it can be, it is important to incorporate these various different types of SEO into your approach. Here is what you need to know about the four main pillars of SEO.
Pillar 1: technical SEO
Technical SEO can seem difficult, but it is a crucial aspect of SEO that you need to know about. Whether you are part of a larger SEO team or just wish to understand how to improve the visibility of your business, the best place to start is technical SEO.
After all, technical SEO concerns the various optimisations you might make to your website and server to help search engine spiders to more easily and effectively crawl and index your site. Such technical characteristics of your site as fast loading times and a secure connection will greatly help to ensure your site ranks well in the search engines.
If you feel a little unsure about checking your site’s current technical SEO on your own, there are various SEO tools available – such as Screaming Frog, Semrush and Ahrefs – that can assist you in doing so.
These tools will help you locate potential technical issues on your website that could be hampering its search engine performance, such as broken links and images. In addition, they can be used to monitor your technical SEO by helping you to:
- Figure out whether your website can be crawled effectively
- Understand which landing pages need to be indexed
- Learn whether your website is mobile-friendly
- Find out the loading speeds of your website
- Understand what the content hierarchy is on your website
- Decide whether your website is compatible with SEO technology
Keep in mind that you should also be considering your website’s design and XML sitemap when it comes to technical SEO. That way, you can keep an eye on which pages may need to be updated.
Pillar 2: content creation
Ultimately, your content is key when it comes to winning over your customers and pushing your website onto page one of different search engines. Essentially, you are considering the user experience when it comes to your content. How interactive is it and will it be able to quickly get the attention of your website’s visitors? After all, you only have a few seconds to encourage them to stay and explore the different available webpages.
Content means a lot more than just writing, although writing tends to be the heart of this type of SEO. It can also mean including videos, audio, and images on your website. Think about each page’s interactivity and what is going to interest your viewer. Your best bet is to include evergreen content and relevant keywords to make sure you can increase its visibility.
Pillar 3: on-site SEO
On-site SEO is where your technical SEO skills will start to come in handy. Once you have figured out how to fully optimise your website, it is time to consider how you can do it landing page by landing page. Once you have figured out the structure of your website, you can consider on-site SEO to improve the visibility of certain landing pages. You can do this by including:
- A strong ‘call to action’ (CTA)
- Easy navigation tools
- Keyword research and optimisation
- Descriptive meta tags, title tags and image tags
- Optimised URLs and meta descriptions
Don’t forget that it can be useful to consider your local audience when it comes to your on-site SEO. Optimise your keywords with area-specific language, such as “digital marketing agency in Essex”, and you will find that you can help improve the range of customers for your website.
Pillar 4: off-site SEO
Off-site SEO is all about building up the authority of your website from the perspective of the outside world. This will include link-building in order to help boost organic traffic and rank-building.
You can connect different areas of your website together through internal links, but can also help improve its authority by attracting inbound links from authoritative external sources. The emphasis here should be on attracting relevant backlinks from quality sites, rather than a larger number of backlinks from poorer, ‘spammier’ sources that could harm your firm’s SEO prospects in the long run.
Are you ready to learn more about the possibilities of SEO?
Don’t forget that if you have any questions about the four pillars of SEO, Mr SEO is here to help. We will be able to provide you with personalised advice to ensure you know how to make your website look and perform as optimally as possible. Feel free to get in touch with our team at any time for an in-depth discussion.
