Firstly, SEO  is about helping search engines get a comprehensive and accurate picture of your site, so that they can assess a page’s relevance to someone’s search query.

Secondly, SEO is about strategies to improve the search engine rankings of your content which in turn increases your search engine traffic.

1. Helping search engines get an accurate picture of each page’s content in order to asses its relevance to a search engine query.

2. Ensuring the right keyphrases rank for the right pages (this is a common issue for large reference sites and results in bounce traffic (see below for ‘bounce traffic’ definition).

2. Ensuring a high percentage of your site’s content is  receiving search traffic.

3. Implementing strategies to increase search rankings for your content.

1. An optimised site will enjoy better search rankings (greater traffic) for appropriate keyphrases.

2. Improved relevance between search queries and content will result in improved conversions (sales, subscriptions, sign-ups etc).

Traditionally, there are 3 broad areas in the optimisation process:

1. Technical: ensuring your site’s architecture and CMS is search friendly for your particular site type and content.

2. Content: optimising your on-page content.

3. Authority: improving domain and page authority, brand, link profiles and social media signals.

1. Kephrases (or keywords) are search phrases entered into a search engine in order to to find a website. All your site’s  search engine traffic is therefore driven by keyphrases.

2. The relationship between a searcher’s keyphrase and its relevance to how it appears on your webpage is complex – this is the essence of SEO.

3. The average user searching for something like ‘Chanel bags’, will most likely only click on the first few results on the first page. If they don’t find what they are looking for on the first or second results pages, they are then likely to rephrase their search, e.g. ‘trendy Chanel bags’ or ‘buy Chanel bags’.  This illustrates the importance of appearing high in the rankings and understanding user behaviour.

4. Keyphrases need to be carefully chosen by an SEO specialist. If many brands, some with established websites, are competing for the traffic from the keyphrase ‘kitchenware’, you will struggle to compete if you are a new site. It is more likely that you will get a good ranking for a less competitive (long tail) construction, say ‘kitchenware uk’ or the more targeted ‘marble kitchenware’. Your SEO strategy needs to be conscious of the type of traffic it wants to attract and its implications.

The term ‘long tail’ is an important term in search engine optimisation and it derives from a graph of the volume of searches on a given theme, where the y-axis is the number of searches and the x-axis  is the words/phrases used to search that theme, listed in descending order of frequency.  The graph produces a curve, where the general and more common terms are searched in high volumes, and where fewer and fewer searches are seen as the terms become more detailed and specialist. On average, the curve tends very gradually towards the x-axis in a long tail.  Importantly, the volume of searches represented by this long tail can far exceed the volume of searches in the “short tail” of more popular words/phrases. Moreover, they are all highly targeted.

A ‘bounce’ refers to a visitor who views 1 page of your site and then leaves. In most (but not all) cases, bounce visits suggest the user has not found what they are looking for on your site.