Search Engine Optimisation Basics
Search Engine Optimisation Basics – what is it all about? You have your website built and running with it proudly presenting your products and services. Now what? I speak to many people about their sites and ask what the objectives are for it and get back many differing comments. At one end of the spectrum some say ‘well it’s only there so we can refer clients to it occasionally’ (also referred to as ‘brochure ware’). So that sounds like having an advert in a magazine but asking people not to find it unless told to! At the other end of the spectrum they believe it is going to produce all of their sales overnight.
In this connected world we live in now I cannot think of a single business that should not have a website that is competing for the first page of the search results from Google and Bing to promote the company. To ‘hide’ the site away is madness, you may as well have a site that is private and only accessible with a password. Why bother to put it on an ‘open’ domain if you don’t want it found?
Alternatively to believe that you are going to get mega amounts of traffic from a brand new website and build your business around that concept is going to be financial suicide.
This is where SEO comes in. The majority of websites are built by designers to look ‘pretty’ but do little towards how the search engines think about them. SEO is all about taking each page of the site and finding out what that page is about. We then have to find ‘keywords’ which real people are using around that topic on the search engines and build those words into that web page telling the search engines to index that page for those words.
There are many points to check at this stage to ensure the search engine has the best ‘view’ of the page possible for those keywords. This includes how the page fits into the rest of the website and how the page is put together with the programming code. Some people say it is not worth wasting a lot of time on this stage. In our experience a really well built page will reap the benefits in the long term with good rankings for your keywords. It is also important to keep reviewing the keywords you are trying to rank for to ensure they are still the ones people are typing in to the search engines and to continually update the pages as necessary.
When this stage of the work is completed and the website is properly indexed in Google then we can start working on building links from other websites that point back to different parts of your website. There is no ‘quick’ way of doing this – don’t believe the ‘we will get you 10,000 links in 24 hours for $50’! It just does not happen. Links have to be built steadily over time in numerous different ways from quality information pointing back to your site. This should include ‘Social’ linking for sites like Facebook and Google+.
Remember, one of the best ranked websites today is Wikipedia. Why, because it is text with lots and lots of links and the only thing search engines understand is text. They cannot ‘read’ a picture or a movie, only the text that goes with them.
