What is Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)?

An Introduction to Search Engine Optimisation

Here is the senario: You spent ages building a great website but it doesn’t get any visitors. How do you compete with the millions of other websites out there? How do you get more visitors to your website? What you need to do is learn about Search Engine Optimization (SEO is an acronym for “search engine optimization”) and begin implementing it on your website.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a form of website marketing. Search Engine Optimization is the process of making your site appear at the top of as high as possible on search engine results, preferably on at least the front page, for your specific keywords and phrases. The higher your website ranks in the results of Google, Yahoo, MSN etc., the greater the chance that your site will be visited and found by potential user/customers.

Simply put, Search Engine Optimization is about making your website visible on search engines.

Why Search Engine Optimize

Everyday, millions of people search the web to find out what they look for. If your website doesn’t come up top in the results, you lose your business to your competitors. SEO is important not only because it brings lots of visitors to your website, but also because it helps to increase the return on investment, if harnessed properly.

SEO optimizes your site for targeted key words. If you are an electrician, those key words maybe “fully qualified electrician”, “NECIC electrician” etc. Your aim is to bring it to the top results on popular search engines when a potential customer types in those keywords. SEO can be a 30-minute job or a permanent activity. Sometimes it is enough to do some generic SEO in order to get high in search engines – if your company only needs to target rare keyword combinations (such as “blue leafed trees”), then you do not have a lot to do in order to get decent placement. But in most cases, if you really want to be at the top, you need to pay special attention to SEO and devote significant amounts of time and effort to it.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a process that requires patience, careful planning, and a long-term approach. Its not a miracle solution to declining sales. It does not happen over night and there are no guarantees that what you will do will work to improve your search engine position.

Understanding Search Engines

Search engines are not humans. The differences between how humans and search engines view web pages is an important lesson to learn for SEO. Unlike humans, search engines are text-driven. Your page may read lovely to a human. Substituting words so you don’t repeat yourself too many times and therefore increasing readability for humans does the exact opposite for search engines. When writing for a search engine you need to know what keywords you are targeting and repeat them enough times to get noticed (not too many times though which I explaine below about keyword density).  All search engine spiders do is crawl the Web, looking at particular site items (mainly text) to get an idea what a site is about. I won’t go into depth here, SEO can be a very in depth topic, but I will explain some basics about search engines to be aware of.

First, search engines crawl the Web to identify what is there, using what is know as a search engine crawler or a spider. Following links from one page to another, indexing everything they find in their path. With so many pages to index out there on the web it is impossible for a spider to visit a website daily just to see if a new page has appeared or if an existing page has been modified. Sometimes crawlers will not visit your site for a month or two, so during this time your SEO efforts will not be rewarded. But there is nothing you can do about it you just have to be patient.

You can however run the Spider Simulator below to see what the search engine spider sees when it looks at your website.

Once a page has been crawled, the next step is to index its content. Essentially, the process of indexing is identifying the words that best describe the page and assigning the page to particular keywords. This is where SEO comes into its own, if you help search engines identify your site content by optimizing it, it will be easier for them to classify your pages correctly and for you to get higher rankings.

OK so your page may have been indexed for the right keywords, but still the search engine has to do some work to decide in what order to show the pages it has in its database for the search term that is being searched on the google website. It does this by calculating the relevancy of each of the pages in its index to the search that has been submitted.

There are various algorithms to calculate relevancy that is why different search engines give different search results pages for the same search string. Furthermore, all major search engines, like Yahoo!, Google, MSN, etc. periodically change their algorithms, firstly to improve them and secondly to stop the search engine cheats, and if you want to keep at the top, you also need to adapt your pages to the latest changes. This is one reason to devote permanent efforts to SEO, if you’d like to be at the top.

The last thing search engines do is show you the results in the browser sorted from the most relevant to the least relevant sites based on their previous crawling, indexing and relevancy activities.

Google is the biggest and most widley used search engine and more than likely the one you should learn more about and target for website ranking. Most search engines operate with the same principles but there are differences in how they rank pages. If you want to target more than one search engine you may need to plan your campain carefully to acount for the different ways the major search engines work in assigning relevancy to your website.

Can SEO harm your website?

There are some risks involved in implementing SEO. Deciding to make changes to your website to implement better SEO or deciding whether to hire an SEO specialist, is a big decision that can potentially improve your website, but you can also risk doing some damage too. Make sure you are aware of the potential advantages as well as the damage that an irresponsible SEO can do to your site.

If you are not able to make changes to your website yourself then you are going to have to hire someone to implement SEO for you and therefore  it’s best you know some basics so you know what you are getting with an SEO package.

One of the basic truths in SEO is that even if you do all the things that are necessary to do, this does not automatically guarantee you top ratings, but if you neglect basic rules, this certainly will not help your website ranking. You could make loads of changes and go nowhere, but not following the basic principles of SEO will mean your site will rank lower.

You need to be realistic too. Certain keywords are extremely competitive. For example “make money”, imagine how many sites you would be competing with for that. Set realistic goals – i.e to get into the top 30 results in Google for a particular keyword, rather than be the number one for 10 keywords in 5 search engines, SEO can’t work miracles but it can help you.

So when can SEO hurt your website. Along your journey you will come across many cheats solutions, or think hmmmmmmm, I could do this to raise my ranking, well be careful, if you think its cheating it probably is, an 9 times out of 10 google knows about it too. Here are some of the top 10 DONT’s when it comes to search engines. These will either get you banned entirely from google or get your site penalised and lower your ranking.

Cloaking – Designing your web site so that search engines see one thing and visitors see another is called cloaking. Nobody likes to be tricked this way. If they’re looking for a Web site on snooker, they’ll be very annoyed to end up on a Web site about cooking.

Duplicate Content – Some cheats have been known to collect page views by duplicating the same content on multiple pages. Don’t copy and paste large amounts of text from your own pages, and certainly don’t violate copyright by copying content from elsewhere.

Add Irrelevant Keywords – When writing your content don’t repeat the same keyword multiple times thinking the more you repeat the word the the higher you will rank. Spamming keywords in your content is a great way to have your ranking lowered in Google. Optimal Keyword Density is what you are looking for. You can use keyword density tools to check how you website rates. The accepted standard for a keyword density is between 3% and 5%, to get recognized by the search engines and you should never exceed it.  Use a tool such as evrsoft.com keyword density checker.

Linking with Bad Websites and Website Neighbourhoods – At some point you will realise that google likes links to your website and rewards you with a better ranking. A link to your site counts as a vote by others as to how good your site is. It doesn’t take long for that bright idea to arise……..hmmmmmmmmm, I need to get lots of links to my site! BE careful, there are link farms out there and linking to them is a great way to lower your PageRank. Link farms are websites which allow people to swop links to each otehr in order to try and raise ranking. Google does not reward this kind of linking and often penalises it. Your links need to be quality links and preferably one way from a good site to you and not reciprocal (both ways). Reciprocal linking is fine but does not carry as much weight with search engines.

Hiding Text – Don’t try to hide keywords by making the background color the same as the font color. This is called keyword stuffing. Google and other search engines are increasingly sophisticated at catching this.

Title Stacking - Don’t try to add extra <title> tags for more keywords. This cousin of keyword stuffing is called title stacking.

Doorway Pages – Doorway pages are pages that are optimized for one key term but are really designed to be gateways to lead you to different content. Doorway pages usually have very little in the way of original content and often cloak or redirect users to the intended Web site. Google doesn’t like it and your ranking will suffer.

In Conclusion

Optimize your web site for Google by designing a clear, well organized site. Gather traffic by writing original content. Don’t try to trick people or take the lazy way out of making a good site. Learn as much as you can about search engine optimisation techniques even if you are going to employ someone to do it for you its good to understand what you are getting. Don’t expect miracles too quickly and start off with one or 2 keywords and perhaps even just targeting google. Be aware of  “dodgy techniques” and the consequences it can have on your page ranking. Be aware any changes can take time to show in the rankings.

You may also like to read:

• What is Google Page Rank?
• Search Engine Optimization In A Nutshell
• Internal SEO
• Forget SEO, You Need SPO: Search Person Optimization
• Benefits of Search Engine Optimization for your Website

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