Buzzwords: SEO

Whether you’ve overheard someone speaking about the Internet of Things at a conference or your go-to news sources are putting ‘blockchain’ and ‘cryptocurrency’ in every sentence, trends and emerging tech can become commonplace quickly. 

With that in mind, we’ve taken a look at one of the most common buzzwords: SEO (or ‘search engine optimisation’). Here are some simple explanations and tips. SEO – once understood – can increase and support the success of your marketing and sales strategies. 

Although there are many different aspects of SEO, and sometimes there are unanswered questions, generally, SEO doesn’t have to be complicated. Simply: it’s flagging your website as being relevant to your target market. You want your website, blog or event page to appear to those searching for your sector. 

SEO is the process of enhancing your online presence to improve your ranking on search engines organically. 

Often misunderstood, a variety of factors can affect search engine rankings, but on a basic level, a search engine decides the order in which to list pages based on how relevant it believes the content is for the searcher. This could mean the page has plenty of keywords relating to the query. Several external links are included, suggesting the page is trustworthy and that information is appropriately researched. 

SEO sites Search Engine Land and Column Five collaborated to create a beneficial infographic for understanding the different components of SEO. The periodic table below splits SEO into ‘On the Page’ (factors you control on your website, e.g. content, alt-text on images, internal links) and ‘Off the Page’ (how your website appears to outsiders, i.e. how trustworthy and popular it is. This could include backlinks from other websites and shares on social media). The table also ranks different processes and behaviours that positively or negatively affect a website’s SEO ratings. 

As well as key information you can add to your blog or website to improve your ranking, several behaviours can also decrease your ranking. Attempting to ‘cheat the system’ to appear higher on Google will be detected by the search engine, and your website will be banned from results. Actions that could lead to a ban include ‘cloaking’, which refers to showing the search engine a different page that users see.  

Tips for good SEO 

Don’t:

Overuse keywords

Keyword stuffing is the practice of jamming keywords repeatedly onto the page in the hopes search engines will decide the page is extremely relevant… 

Search engines are more intelligent than that! There’s no ‘magic number’ for the number of times your keyword should appear on a page – it depends on much text there is. Yoast’s SEO plugin suggests that 1-2% of your copy is your chosen keyword on our blogs. The freemium tool will guide you in optimising your content for SEO. For context, this blog is [x words] long, and ‘SEO’ is found [x times]; this equals a keyword density of [x%]. 

Fill your page with ads.

Search engines will know! Not only will ads distract from your message, but search engines can detect adverts, which will negatively affect your ranking.   

Do: 

Use headers

Choose some keywords to target and use them in the page title, link and headers throughout. Don’t overuse the keyword but including it in relevant headers and titles will improve your ranking as search engines will know the content throughout the page is relevant. 

Secure your site

As well as content being important, search engines will also look at the ‘architecture’ of your site. Is it mobile optimised? Does it load quickly? Importantly, is it secure? If you’re selling tickets to an event, customers must trust your website. SSL secures our ticket embed, so any transactions will always be secure. Not everyone understands web safety; therefore, it can be really beneficial to secure your site with SSL. It’s straightforward to do and costs very little.

Hopefully, we’ve provided you with a simple way of understanding what SEO is and how it can greatly improve your brand’s visibility. Plus, by using Helm Tickets as your ticketing platform (particularly utilising our embed tool, which includes backlinks and keywords), you’ll quickly improve your own SEO ranking.