SEO Fundamentals – (Intro to SEO) – Part 1
(music) Hey there this is Polly McGee also
known as Dr. Digital reporting for the digital ready program. In this short
video we're going to talk about search engine optimisation also known as SEO.
Now those three letters might send fear deep into your heart coz
SEO always seems to be a little bit complex; it's got algorithms; you need to know keywords; it's really not that difficult but it's really important if you want
your business to be found. And of course that's why you're watching this digital
ready presentation coz you want to make take full advantage of this digital
economy.
Alright let's dive in deep. So the bazillion dollar question "how do
I get my page to rank number one in a Google search?" well I'm not entirely sure
that should be your primary ambition but if you take a few of these tips on board
you'll certainly get it right up there. When we talk about SEO in Australia we
tend to talk about Google because Australians loooove Google we use it all
the time in fact Google has 67 percent of the global market share but in
Australia it's of course 93 percent. We sort of love it. There are other search
engines like bing and so forth but when we talk about SEO in the context of this
video we're talking really about Google.
So therefore we're also talking
about the standard set for SEO in Australia being the Google standards
although the other search engines are pretty much quite similar. So why should
you care about SEO? If you don't care about SEO what it means is that when
your customers search for your business and try and find you they're likely to
find a whole heap of other businesses competing with you and you want to make
sure that not only do they get in your face but they get into your cash
register and that they're able to track you down as quickly and easily as
possible.
So to understand how they'll do that we're going to look at two things
we're going to look at how Google works and we're also going to look at how how
user behavior influences how people find you and your business so you can make
sure that you are right up front. 89% of customers begin their buying
process with a search process in a search engine. So let's talk about how
Google works so you can make sure that you are in that search
process. So Google basically has Google BOTS it all sounds a little bit tech and
cool doesn't it? So those Google BOTS search the internet
and they pick up page contents or they index page content and we're going to
get into a little later on in another video how you actually optimise your
page so don't worry about that too much for now you'll just have to watch that
video. The Google BOTS are really sophisticated and so they go along and
they crawl and they find information so when I come along and do my search, let's say I'm searching for really fantastic digital instruction for my small
business in Tasmania, I want to make sure that digital ready is going to come up
straightaway.
So if I'm looking I might type in a few different words and
hopefully those words correspond with the words of the page of your business
if that's what you provide. From a user point of view on the other end of the
computer as I said I'm going to be typing in maybe a string of words I
might type in a sentence or I might just type in one or two words so once that
happens Google's out there finding that and then
they throw up a series of pages for me look at and that's what we call a
ranking.
So number one is going to be the one that most meets all of the criteria
that the search engines had. Now above those in Google you'll get paid
advertising and again that's part of the Google AdWords process; when you pay to
have your business ranked as number one you can put all those keywords in there
and use AdWords to your advantage. But for now let's just talk about a normal
organic search. So as a a customer I'm searching through I get a series of
businesses that come up, I click on those businesses and I'll go through to that
page. Now in terms of my customer behavior if I don't see what I want
straightaway or if I'm not it doesn't meet my criteria I'll bounce off that
page and I'll go back to the search and I'll start again.
Statistics show that
very few people ever get to the second page in Google in their search behavior
they pretty much either find what they want on page one or they abandon their
search altogether. Which is why it's important that you know all the
different elements that are going to help you. In the next video we're going
to talk about page optimisation but for now the key message I'm gonna leave you
with; is that a lot of it comes from your content and content is super
important. So Google doesn't ever disclose their algorithm and how we know
what ranks where; it's very secret what we do know however, is it changes all the
time but also that it's very strongly predicated on content. So Google
algorithms now look for quality of content, they look for authenticity of
content which is quite a great equalizer in the scheme of things coz what
that means is that if you're a really massive organisation or you're really
tiny organisation; the organisation that has the most authentic content with the
best optimisation and the best links is likely to be the one that actually gets
the higher ranking so you can compete quite fairly.
What that means though is
that every single page of your website needs to be optimised and needs to have
all the quality content that the Google BOTS when they go searching are going to
push you up in the rankings. So Google basically is where it's at. There's a
whole range of activities that you can do to make sure that you are fully
optimised for those BOTS to find you. Don't forget you got to think about
search behaviour and if you think about your own behavior when you're searching
that's going to give you a pretty good idea what your customers are going to be
doing as well. So we're going to wrap up the intro to SEO right there. Click
through to the next video and have a look at how you can best optimise your
page. Polly McGee or Dr. Digital signing out for the digital ready
program. If you want more information on SEO or anything to do with the digital
economy, head over to our web page digitalready.tas.gov.au; we've got fact
sheets, we've got videos, we've got seminars, we've got blogs and we've got
the live coaches who you can get in touch with and who can help you out.
And
of course we've got a full range of info on our social media, our Facebook page
and Twitter as well. See you on the interwebs and see you on the next video. (music).
