Search Engine Optimisation Explained
What is SEO?
SEO is an acronym for "Search Engine Optimisation". Search Engine Optimisation is the process of optimising one's website to rank higher in search engine results.
Does it affect me?
If you have ownership of, manage or simply planning a new website then this affects you. If your website will or does rely on users finding your site via search engines then this is particularly important.
What happens when users execute a search on a search engine?
Search engines continuously send "spiders" out across the web searching millions of websites daily for keywords and phrases that search engine users have typed into search engines. Pages that are then found containing the relevant keywords and phrases are then stored on their database of links.
A common misconception is that for every search a user executes the spiders crawl the web and return their results directly, however this is not the case. The spiders return results from a previously populated database of links; these links are ranked according to their relevance to the searched keyword(s) or phrase(s).
How does SEO improve my website's chance of ranking high on search engines?
Search Engine Spiders don't often crawl websites and therefore when they do it is vitally important that they can easily navigate your site and find important keywords and phrases that you would associate with your website. If spiders find keywords occurring often on your site will rank higher in subsequent search results.
What steps should I take to improve my performance in SEO?
- Take careful consideration when wording the content for your website. Usually this means describing your products or services using wording that you would expect your customers to use, which might differ from your own corporate terminology.
- Ensure that your keywords and phrases are correctly positioned on your site. E.g. search engines usually look at the headlines and header tags (<h1><h2><h3>) and the first paragraph of text rather than text that is located at the bottom or footer of the site. So correct positioning is key.
- Using appropriate Meta keywords and descriptions to help enforce words and phrases that you would like to associate with your website.
- Include your website on related directories and credible non-directory websites e.g. society websites that your are a member of. This will help create links back to your site while spiders are crawling other sites therefore increase your relevance to a particular subject.
- Submission of XML and HTML sitemaps to search engines helps the spiders crawl your site correctly. HTML sitemaps will help users to navigate your site, which will reduce the risk of content not being found.
- Continued monitoring of SEO performance is a must, there are plenty of statistic counters and analytical applications available to help manage your website statistics one of the most popular and extensive being Google Analytics.
