SEO or search engine optimisation is the process of improving ranking in search engine results.
How do you look for a particular product/service/contact? We bet you go on to a search engine (normally Google)! So, common sense says that the best way for you to get the traffic to your website is to appear on the first page of the Search Engine results. Simples! So…how do you get there?
Getting a high ranking is the goal of most websites. In years gone by, “experts” have tried to trick the system only to find this doesn’t work when search engines change their algorithms which they constantly do to avoid this from happening!
In as simple terms as we can make it, one purpose of search engines is to determine the relevancy of keywords to the content of your web pages. They do this by using software robots to index all the words on billions of pages. Then, they analyze these indexes according to a set of secret algorithms. Once that page is found, the ideal scenario is for that page to contain links that take you to more information which contains more links and so on.
To keep the business of the person searching, every search engine will do what it can to make the sites it suggests relevant to that search. Search engines do not have people looking through every page of every site and then associating that page with different search terms! They use “spiders” or “robots” that follow the link trails.
So…you type in “sofas” into a search engine and your site may be listed as Number 2 on page 1 or Number 602 on page 60, but those 600 places make a huge difference! Search Engines will place the sites that they think are the most relevant at the top of the list.
So how is relevance calculated?
There are three big factors that the search engines look at to determine how relevant your site is to the search: quality of the site, text, and links.
Site – how quickly it loads – people will not wait 60 seconds for a site to load! How often it is updated and the coding behind it is also key.
Text – we could go on forever! However the more relevant text your website has the better. Text in the title of the page gets more weight than in the body of the page because the Search Engines figure that the title is most likely showing what the page is about!
Links – It is important to have both inbound and outbound links. Think of links as “fans” or “supporters”. More people that link to your site, the more your site has credibility. It is obviously good to have a site linked to you that shares something in common where possible! Again, we could talk about this all day!
So…..now you know the basics of SEO, why not give us a call and we can grab a coffee with you to tell you about this in more detail.
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