Search engine optimisation (SEO): the basics
As Google rankings have become more significant, SEO has become
more than just a buzzword: the quest to reach the top of search
listings has spawned an entire industry, with hundreds of companies
all competing to reach the top of their game. But with between
70-80% of traffic for most websites coming from search engines -
and 80% of that from Google - it's an industry you should pay
attention to if you're serious about increasing traffic to your
website.
What is SEO?
- Search engine optimisation (SEO) is the practice of making your
website as search-friendly as possible through the appropriate use
of keywords, coding, copy and link-backs.
- While most SEO strategies concentrate on making websites
Google-friendly, it's a mistake to ignore other search engines:
While Google enjoys an 81.22% market share, Yahoo! has a 9.21%
share, Microsoft's new search engine Bing has a 5.31% slice of the
market and AOL's search engine attracts 1.74% of search engine
users.
- One of the main factors SEO takes into consideration is
keywords. When you optimise your site, you will analyse search data
to target it towards certain terms people - for example,
'garden furniture' - inserting the keywords into pages as often as
possible.
- Search engines also use linkbacks, or links from other websites
to yours, to determine how high up the search listings your website
should be. The more linkbacks you have, the higher up you'll be -
although the emphasis is more on quality than quantity. To
paraphrase the idiom - a link from the BBC is worth two from some
obscure link directory.
- Search engines also look at your website's metatags - the
invisible page titles and descriptions which appear on search
engine listings, but not on the actual page. Use these to increase
your 'keyword density' - the number of keywords inserted into a web
page.
- SEO uses HTML and other programming languages derived from it.
At the moment, Google and other search engines cannot read
complicated coding such as Flash or Javascript, although this may
be set to change in the future.
Why do I need to optimise my website?
- On top of the statistics we've already quoted - 80% of web
traffic comes from search engines - a report has showed most people
using search engines don't look beyond the third page of results,
so getting your site on to those all-important first three pages
for your chosen search term should be a priority.
- Because the internet allows even the smallest, most local shops
to get business from across the world, merely relying on
word-of-mouth is no longer sufficient. If the goods or services you
sell are unique, you'll want prospective customers to know about
them, and the best way to do that is by making them show up in
search.
- Search engines want to expand their market share by making
users' experiences as useful as possible, so they need to return
results relevant to people's search terms. SEO helps to make your
site more relevant to users' search terms, making it appear higher
up the results page - which in turn will drive more traffic to your
website.
Checklist
- SEO is the practice of making your website as search
engine-friendly as possible
- 80% of web traffic comes from search engines
- Don't just concentrate on Google - other search engines make up
almost 20% of the market share
- SEO uses keywords to drive traffic to your site
- Google uses linkbacks to determine how useful your site is
- Programming languages such as Flash and Javascript are too
advanced for Google to understand
- Most people don't look further than the third page of search
results
- SEO helps to make your searches more relevant
FAQ
Can search rankings vary?
Yes. Search engines' spiders are constantly crawling and
re-crawling your pages, looking for changes in content or numbers
of linkbacks, and will alter your ranking accordingly.
Why is my website ranked highly on Yahoo!, but not on
Google?
Different search engines use different algorithms and use
different rules to determine where your site will come in their
rankings, so there's a good chance you could be placed differently
on different search engines.
Jargon buster
Spider: A computer programme which 'crawls'
websites to find out what sort of information it contains in order
to determine where it should be ranked on the results page. Also
known as a robot or a crawler.
Indexing: The process of determining how high up a
website should come in search results. Once you have submitted your
site to a search engine, its pages will be indexed.
Meta tags: HTML codes inserted into a web page, some
of which show up as the description and header in search
results.
Resources
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