3 Pillars of Search Engine Optimisation – an overview

There are 3 key areas of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) that businesses should focus their efforts on. With the continuous updates and Algorithm changes from Google, these three strands remain constant and are adaptable to the ever-changing SEO landscape. They are Technical SEO, Content SEO and Link SEO.

Technical Search Engine Optimisation:

This is the first stage of SEO and is all about the technical elements of your website as opposed to dealing with any content or links. If your website is not set up from a Technical perspective then parts 2 and 3 won’t be effective. All your settings in your website need to be configured to work to Googles’ Guidelines such as, but not limited to:

• Having a secure site so HTTPS.
• Submission of Site Maps to make crawling your site easier and quicker.
• Formatting your on-page URLS.
• Ensuring broken pages have Redirections in place.
• Your website is Fast and mobile optimised which also includes optimising images and content for load speed.
• Ensuring each page has Title, Description and Head Tags.

This list can go on but using SEMRush Site Audit tool will allow you to complete a full technical audit of your site to show areas for improvement.

Content Focussed SEO:

Without ‘content’, it won’t be possible for your site to rank on search engines such as Google or Bing. There are 4 areas to focus on when writing quality structured content:

• Keyword Research – understanding what keywords your users/customers search for on Google is key. If you have tools such as Google Analytics implemented on-site and have set up Google Search Console you can look at your Google Search Queries to see what searches were performed that led customers to your site. Try to focus on keywords that have high search volumes. See our article on the Google Keyword Tool for more details
• Keyword Optimisation – This is all about Where and How to use keywords within the content. This covers everything from Title Tags and Headers to page URLs. You need to find the right balance with keywords, overuse of the keyword and ‘over tagging’ can be negative so being specific with your keyword selection can help your SEO rankings.
• Content Optimisation – is all about organising content in a logical way which helps keeps users on your website longer. Providing internal links is key and having menus and site maps will make it easier for your content to allow users to flow through your site to the desired outcome e.g. capture data or drive sales.
• Content Promotion – Done through internal links, external links and through promoting keywords on pay-per-click campaigns (PPC). This part overlaps with elements of Link SEO (below) but is key to increasing your content and site visibility.

Link SEO:

Building authoritative links to your site helps to improve your site authority.

You need to ensure that when you perform an outreach campaign (when actively placing links or building relationships with other websites) that you create high-quality links. For example, a product review on one website could link to your site if you supply and sell that product. Make sure you consider link positioning on your site and have internal links that will help users get more information e.g. when discussing Speed in this blog placing a link to another article that discusses SEO Speed optimisation.

However be careful don’t overflood with links, Google penalises low authority links, which is why we use SEMRush tools for backlink audits to see which referring links are deemed toxic and which are not.

Get expert advice when looking at SEO, it can be an expensive lesson if done wrong and the more you understand, the more complicated it all becomes.

Search Engine Optimisation thinking from Yorkshire Powerhouse

Have you any questions?

Here at Yorkshire Powerhouse, we’re happy to help as much as possible – is there anything else we can do to help you, do you have any further questions or can we help introduce you to an expert – please let us know: