Read full blog post at: https://www.todhost.com/blog/digital-marketing-seo/170-seo-what-search-engines-love-and-hate-about-websites

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a common word and if you have worked within the web development industry or even manage a simple personal website, you will likely have come across this word. It affects websites and will significantly determine its placement in search engines and visitor traffic. In this post, we shall examine the key friendly factors that search engines love and which if implemented, will affect your website performance.

What is SEO?

First, let us refresh our understanding of what is SEO. SEO is the umbrella term for all the methods you can use to ensure the visibility of your website and its content on search engine results pages (SERPs).

The methods vary from the practices you can achieve behind the scenes on your website (we tend to refer to this as on-page SEO) to all the promotional off-page approaches you can use to raise your site's visibility (link-building, social media marketing).

For the purpose of this article, when we talk about visibility, we mean how high up the SERP your website appears for certain search terms in the organic results. Organic results refer to those that appear naturally on the page, rather than in the paid-for sections. Paid search is also a large part of search engine marketing.

Why do you need SEO?

Good SEO through building a strong site architecture and providing clear navigation will help search engines index your site quickly and easily. This will also, more importantly, provide visitors with a good experience of using your site and encourage repeat visits. It's worth considering that Google is increasingly paying attention to user experience.

When it comes to how much traffic is driven by search engines to your website, the percentage is substantial, and could perhaps be the clearest indicator of the importance of SEO.

In 2014, Conductor suggested 64% of all web traffic comes from organic search, compared to 2% from social, 6% from paid search, 12% direct and 15% from other referral sources.

Of all organic traffic, in 2015 it was found that Google accounts for more than 90% of global organic search traffic. So obviously the rules set by Google will be very important in your SEO practices and you need a strong presence on Google SERPs.

One study from Advanced Web Ranking shows that on the first SERP, the top five results account for 67.60% of all clicks and the results from six to 10 account for only 3.73%.

It's therefore vital that your site appears in the top five results. Much of our efforts have been put into achieving this though we rank well for less competitive keywords.

How are you going to achieve this? The following tips will help.

What are search engines looking for?

1) Relevance

Search engines try to provide the most relevant results to a searcher's query, whether it's a simple answer to the question, (the answer of which Google will likely provide without you having to leave the SERP) to more complicated queries.

How search engines provide these results is down to their own internal algorithms, which we'll never truly determine, but there are factors that you can be certain will influence these results and they're all based around relevance.

2) The quality of your content

Helpful content counts. You have to publish helpful, useful articles, videos or other types of media that are popular and well produced. Write for actual human beings rather than the search engine itself. Well, you should. Latest research from Search metrics on ranking factors indicates that Google is moving further towards longer-form content that understands a visitor's intention as a whole, instead of using keywords based on popular search queries to create content.

Basically, stop worrying about keywords and focus on the user experience.

3) User experience

There are many SEO benefits for providing the best possible user experience. You need an easily navigable, clearly searchable site with relevant internal linking and related content. All the stuff that keeps visitors on your webpage and hungry to explore further.

4) Site speed

This has become a ranking factor and you should be interested in how quickly your webpages load.

5) Cross-device compatibility

;Is your website and its content equally optimized for any given screen size or device? Bear in mind that Google has stated that responsive design is its preferred method of mobile optimization.

6) Internal linking

Internal linking can help push traffic around the site and that may lead to higher trust signals for Google. Internal linking has many advantages:

It provides your audience with further reading options. As long as they're relevant and you use clear anchor text (the clickable highlighted words in any give link). This can help reduce your bounce rates.

It helps to improve your ranking for certain keywords. If we want this article to rank for the term SEO basics then we can begin linking to it from other posts using variations of similar anchor text. This tells Google that this post is relevant to people searching for SEO basics. Some experts recommend varying your anchor text pointing to the same page as Google may see multiple identical uses as suspicious.

It helps Google crawl and index your site. Those little Googlebots that are sent out to fetch new information on your site will have a better idea of how useful and trustworthy your content is, the more they crawl your internal links.

7) Authority

An authority website is a site that is trusted by its users, the industry it operates in, other websites and search engines. Traditionally a link from an authority website is very valuable, as it's seen as a vote of confidence. The more of these you have, and the higher quality content you produce, the more likely your own site will become an authority too.

Read full blog post at: https://www.todhost.com/blog/digital-marketing-seo/170-seo-what-search-engines-love-and-hate-about-websites