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Which Parts of SEO Still Matter?

Search engine optimisation, or SEO for short, is important for all websites. If you have built a beautiful new website, you need it to be found by popular search engines like Google and Bing, and that’s what SEO does: optimise a website so it’s better found by search engines and therefore more easily found by potential customers.

The idea of SEO has been around for more than awhile now. Google has been around since 1998, but before that there was AltaVista in 1995, Yahoo in 1994, and even earlier search engine-like things that were a lot more specialised. As search grew, the algorithms changed, and therefore ways to get a website into search changed too.

Because of this you may have heard a lot of different pieces of advice on how to make a website perform in search. Is this advice still worthwhile or is it thinking that’s stuck in the 90’s?

Let’s find out.

Create Websites for Humans to Improve SEO

Ultimately it’s going to be humans coming to a website, humans consuming the content, and humans becoming the customer of a business. Because of this, at the very core of everything to do with SEO, a website needs to appeal to humans. Yes, there are aspects of a website that humans don’t really see that will affect a site’s search visibility, but ensuring a site is good for humans is a great first step in SEO.

While Google is generally pretty secretive about its search algorithm, their very own John Mueller admits that spelling and grammar are a search signal as they relate to quality. Mueller also explains that the presentation of a website can impact rankings. To paraphrase Mueller: if the information is expert quality but the presentation is amateurish, it reflects how the website is perceived by both people and search engines.

Backlinks to a Website and SEO

Backlinks were one of the search signals in Google’s original algorithm, and they’re still important today, but in a different way than before. To put it basically, it used to be about the quantity of backlinks to a website that mattered, but this isn’t as much the case today. These days search engines are able to evaluate both the quantity and quality of a backlink. In this way, a few high quality backlinks are worth a lot more than a lot of poor quality ones.

Because of this, a lot of our advice to clients around link building is to try and do it organically. Rather than getting a high amount of links that aren’t relevant, reach out to partner businesses to get relevant higher quality links from them.

Technical Aspects of a Website That Affect SEO

While we emphasise that creating a website for humans is important, there are technical aspects that may not immediately be apparent to humans, but still affect the human experience of a website. These are things like:

Core Website Vitals

Ultimately this comes down to site speed (and some design aspects), but obviously site speed is important to all visitors.

SSL certificate

An SSL certificate is pretty much mandatory for modern websites, even if you’re not processing payments.

Mobile Usability

More than half of all website traffic comes from mobile. Having a good mobile experience for users is extremely important to search engines.

Telling Search Engines What a Page Is About

This means relatively basic but important formatting choices. Search engines rely on some pretty basic things to get an initial impression on what a page is about, and it’s important to give them the right information. And it really comes down to two basic things.

Heading tags: this is considered a strong signal in search. While using the correct H1 or H2 tag is important, simply putting in a heading does a lot of good. Having a heading that says “here’s how to do it” isn’t very descriptive; search engines don’t know what “it” refers to. On the other hand, a heading that says “here’s how to make a cake” really shows search engines what a page section is about. Of course you want to avoid spamming keywords and ruining readability though. In this article, for example, we’ve tried to tie subheadings back to the key theme of broad SEO principles, but not at the expense of readability.

Page titles: just like headings, the title of a page gives search engines a lot of information regarding what that page is about.

Good Anchor Text Can Sway Search Rankings

While links to a website from other sites are important, they’re often hard to control. While they don’t provide quite as much value, internal links throughout a site show search engines the relative importance of a page on a website as well as providing valuable context on what that page is about.

For example, don’t just say “click here.” Say something like “we provide SEO services.”

Understand That SEO Takes Time

Ultimately it’s about monitoring things and allowing the time for changes to take effect. Yes, you can build a site with the best SEO infrastructure in mind. Yes, you can optimise each page for specific searches based on your research. But you don’t know what’s working and what’s not without monitoring your site’s performance and being prepared to make changes.

Making changes doesn’t necessarily mean your initial assumptions and plans were wrong, it just means things can be done better. And that’s why there’s no SEO magic bullet.

If you’d like to talk about your site’s SEO, get in touch with us.