Answering your popular questions on SEO

SEO is a digital marketing strategy that helps websites grow their online reach and presence. However, there are many elements and tactics that you can use as part of an effective SEO strategy. To help you better understand the process and expectations, we’ve answered your most popular questions on SEO.

SEO strategy

SEO strategy

Which are the best SEO strategies?

Many different SEO strategies help you improve your page’s rankings. However, some SEO strategies work more effectively than others. The most popular and effective SEO strategies include creating high-quality content, link-building, and effective keyword research.

How does SEO fit into a broader digital marketing strategy?

SEO is one element of a digital marketing strategy a business can implement to grow online. Implementing a successful SEO strategy as part of a broader digital marketing strategy helps attract visitors to your site by increasing your visibility in the search results.

How do you create a solid and effective SEO strategy?

You must use various SEO tactics to create an effective SEO strategy. While every SEO strategy is different, there are several steps you can incorporate to help build a successful SEO strategy. Some of the steps include:

  • Conducting effective keyword research.
  • Creating high-quality content that provides value.
  • Optimising pages on your site for the target keywords and key phrases.
  • Optimising a page’s metadata, including meta description and title.
  • Develop an effective link-building strategy, including internal linking.
  • Monitor results and adjust accordingly.

What is SEO in marketing, and how does it work?

SEO (or search engine optimisation) is the process of optimising website pages for specific keywords that help to improve your ranking potential in the SERPs. Search engines use crawlers to discover, crawl, and index web pages that determine rankings based on an algorithm.

User experience and SEO

User experience and SEO

What is more important, SEO or UI/UX design?

SEO and UI/UX are both important, and neither should be favoured over the other. An effective digital marketing strategy will seek to improve ranking potential through SEO and user experience.

Improving your user experience by implementing popular web design features with users can also help improve your SEO strategy.

What is the role of user experience (UX) in SEO?

The user experience plays a crucial role in SEO. By optimising and improving the user experience, you are improving how users interact with your site and increasing the likelihood of users converting. Improving the user experience and encouraging visitors to stay on your site longer boosts your SEO.

Is SEO a long-term strategy?

Yes, SEO is a long-term strategy that requires continual optimisation to improve your rankings. As algorithms are continually updated and competitors’ websites change, you’ll need to constantly update your SEO strategy accordingly. It can also take some time for any changes to take effect.

Web design and SEO

Web design and SEO

What is the importance of SEO in web design?

Websites are an essential marketing tool. Both web design and SEO work together to help improve and enhance a website’s ranking potential. It also helps improve the user experience and ensures users stay on your site for a long time.

What is the difference between SEO and web design?

While web design and SEO work together, they have significant differences. Web design focuses on the site’s design and content layout. SEO focuses on finding valuable keywords you want a page to rank for and optimising the content of a page for higher rankings.

What is SEO? Do web design companies do it?

SEO (or search engine optimisation) is the process of optimising the pages and content on your site for keywords you want to rank highly for in search engine result pages (SERPs). SEO may also include content creation around the keywords you aim to rank for.

Both web design and SEO are separate disciplines despite working well together. Not every web design agency will provide SEO services along with web design. However, most digital agencies like Dreamscape Design will offer web design and SEO services.

What is an SEO-friendly web design?

An SEO-friendly, mobile-friendly web design will ensure the website has a positive user experience, high-quality and informative content, fast loading speeds, and easy navigation. Optimising the content on a web page and the metadata improves a web design’s SEO-friendliness.

Check out our web design FAQs for answers to your popular questions

Schema markup

What is SEO schema?

Schema markup is a type of microdata that provides search engine crawlers with information on a webpage’s content. Schema markup (or structured data) is compatible with all search engines and can affect how your web page listings display in the search results.

What is the importance of schema markup in SEO?

Schema markup is essential in an SEO strategy as it helps enhance the rich results of pages in search results. It also provides crawlers with a much more detailed understanding of a page’s content that improves the indexing of web pages by standardising webpages’ HTML tags.

How can we implement SEO schema on website pages?

To implement schema markup on website pages, you must develop markup code using a JSON-LD, Microdata, or RDFa format. To write the schema mark-up code, you can manually write it yourself or use a tool to create it for you.

To get started with creating schema markup, visit the Schema.org website.

Blogs

Blogs and SEO

Does SEO matter for blogs and articles?

Yes, SEO is essential for blogs and articles on your site. You should optimise each blog article for a specific keyword or key-phrase to increase its ranking potential. By optimising the SEO of blog articles, you help improve your website’s ability to answer user’s questions and solve their pain points.

Are short blog posts bad for a website and SEO?

Short blog posts are not necessarily harmful to your website and SEO. However, shorter blog content is not as beneficial as long word content. That said, the most important factor is for your content to be high quality and provide value.

While the length of a blog can vary, you should aim for a blog length between 1,500 and 2,500 words to cover a topic in detail and provide value.

How many blogs should you post for SEO?

There is no single answer for how many blogs you should post and how frequently. However, blogs that regularly post content stand a much higher chance of ranking in search results (providing the content provides value). On average, you should aim for 2-4 blog posts per month.

How do you know if blog posts are SEO-friendly?

The best to determine if blog posts are SEO-friendly is that they are optimised for a specific keyword. However, this can be difficult to determine. Consider implementing tools like Yoast SEO to help you determine a blog post’s SEO-friendliness.

Duplicate content

Does duplicate content within a single page affect SEO?

Duplicate or near-duplicate content is the same content appearing in multiple places online. Whether duplicate content is on a single page or different domains, it can negatively impact your SEO performance. Search engines can lower your rankings due to duplicate content issues.

Does Google penalise you for duplicate content?

Yes, Google and other search engines penalise websites that have duplicate content. Websites that repeatedly use duplicate content can experience a penalty that lowers your search rankings or removes you entirely from search results.

Links

SEO and links

What is the importance of internal linking in SEO?

Internal links are links directed to another relevant page on your website. Internal linking improves navigation on your site, allowing users to discover and find pages much more easily. It also helps improve the crawlability of your site for search engines.

How many internal links are good for SEO?

There is no set answer to how many internal links are good for SEO. However, you ensure that every page on your site has multiple internal links from various pages. On average, you should include around four internal links per page, with an additional link for every 300 words.

How do you optimise internal linking for SEO?

To optimise internal links for SEO, you should consider:

  • Linking to a relevant page.
  • Use keyword-rich anchor text.
  • Aim to include links higher on the page.
  • Avoid using duplicate anchor text.
  • Link hierarchical pages.

What is link building, and how does it work?

Link-building is an SEO strategy that focuses on developing your website’s backlink profile by increasing the number of external links directing to your site. Effective link-building will seek to gain high-quality backlinks from relevant, authoritative, and trustworthy websites.

What are the benefits of SEO link building?

Links are one of Google’s most important ranking factors in its algorithm to determine search engine rankings. Websites with strong backlink profiles from high-quality websites stand a much higher chance of ranking highly in search engine results pages.

Should I focus solely on link building for SEO?

No, you should ensure an SEO strategy uses many tactics. While link building is an important SEO tactic for gaining higher rankings, you also need to create high-quality content and optimise pages on your site for keywords.

Google Business Profile

How important is Google Search Console for SEO?

Google Search Console is a service operated by Google that allows web admins to monitor the status of their website. Google Search Console is important for SEO as it will enable you to check and monitor indexing status, crawling errors, and search queries that draw people to your site.

What is an SEO score on Google Search Console?

Google Search Console does not provide a score to determine your SEO effectiveness. Instead, Google Search Console provides several metrics that allow you to see how well your website performs in search results. Metrics include click-through rate, impressions, and average position.

Social media and SEO

Social media and SEO

What is the impact of social media on SEO?

While social media is not a direct ranking factor that impacts your SEO performance, it can have an influence. Sharing links on social media to your website helps improve web traffic while building your online presence.

Does posting links on social media posts help SEO?

Yes, however, the effect this has on SEO performance is minimal. Links posted on social media are no-follow. They do not contribute to your backlink profile or affect your site’s authority. In terms of SEO, links on social media only help to increase traffic to your site.

Did we answer all your SEO-related questions? SEO is a long-term strategy that requires continually optimising your site’s content and pages for specific keywords. Developing a holistic SEO strategy that uses a range of tactics can help you improve your website’s rankings for higher visibility and online presence.