Search Engine Optimisation

What is Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)?

Part1

I am sure you know that Search engines are one of the primary ways that Internet users find web sites. Therefore a web site with good search engine listings may attract a substantial number of visitors, ultimately that will depend on the nature of your business.

SEO is optimising your web pages so that they are accessible to search engines and developed in ways that help improve the chances they will be found.

This is not ‘Rocket Science’ it is simply understanding how search engines work and this does take constant research on our part to keep up to date with the finer details of this process.

How do search engines find your page?

To describe this process in Layman’s terms we offer the following analogy. Imagine you are driving along a motorway, you are running low on fuel and you have just passed a sign that says the next services is two hundred miles away! So obviously you need to turn off the motorway and find a petrol station.

In the distance you see a town, so you turn off and drive in that direction (hoping that there will be a petrol station!). This is a large town and you start searching for fuel, there are signs everywhere, burgers, newsagents, clothes shops and banks writ large. You have your mind focused on petrol, after all you are running out! Then you spot the sign you have been searching for, BUY PETROL HERE so you drive over and fill up.

To continue, what you did not realise is that you passed two filling stations without realising it. In that town there are two local companies with strong brand identities in the area, Supercharge and Demon. They are so well known and competitive that they are concentrating on free offers to entice customers. The supercharge sign said, ‘Supercharge, Free Flowers This Week’ and the other one was enticing customers with ‘Demon, Free Airmiles This Week’. You missed these because they were not displaying the keyword you were looking for, PETROL.

Clearly the petrol station you discovered will in all likelihood attract more out of town visitors than the other two.

If we now compare your imaginary search for petrol with a search engine indexing all the businesses in that town (It could be the World Wide Web). In essence a search engine is an out of town visitor and it will rank the one you found higher in search results than the other two.

Why?

A search engine is analytical, it does not work on an emotional level, so it will ignore the promise of free gifts when it ranks the three web pages advertising petrol.

That is rather simplistic isn’t it?

Yes it is and there is far more involved in a web page achieving a good position on a search results page.

Tell me more

We must first describe what a search engine is and when we refer to a search engine we are referring to a service offered similar to the Google search engine. There are other types of search engines available, however in this short article we are just going to concentrate on this one.

Google is a crawler based search engine, it utilises software to literally crawl the web and discover web pages. It then adds all the pages it finds to a database, or this could be referred to as a catalogue.

If you were to enter the search phrase ‘Search Engine Optimisation’ in Google it would then search through it’s giant catalogue of web pages it has found and return the results based on the relevancy of the search phrase.

How does Google rank pages?

In simple terms, Google uses what is referred to as an algorithm, this is a set of rules it uses when it searches through its catalogues of pages. The first thing it will look for is a page with the title ‘Search Engine Optimisation’. It will then look to see if this phrase is contained within a headline on the page and also contained within the descriptive content of the page.

As a final step it will also determine how many times this phrase is contained within the body of the document to round off the relevancy algorithmic test.

Is there anything else?

Yes, another key requirement deployed by the Google algorithm is what we would describe as ‘Authrative linking’. Google will look to see if there were any other web pages from other websites linking to the page, a good example would be from a site devoted to information on SEO. If this were in fact the case Google would then increase the relevancy of the page and if it found numerous instances of this it would rank the page higher still.

Submitting your site to Google

When you have optimised your page / website (More information is widely available on the Net on how to do this) you should submit your site to Google for indexing.

To summarise

Your web page needs to be optimised based on the keyword or phrase you predict people will use to search for your products or services.

The page title should contain your keyword or search phrase.

The heading of the page should also incorporate this and the content has to be relevant. It will therefore contain your keywords / phrase naturally throughout the description of the product or services you are offering.

My website does not show up in Search Engines, can you help?

Yes we can, sometimes a site just needs further development. However we have come across a few sites that will need to be completely redesigned. In these cases the original web designer has simply not considered any of the above points. We would be more than happy to discuss this with you so please contact us.

SEO fundamentals

It is important to think of SEO as an integrated process when a website is initially developed, not as a secondary process that comes at a later stage (Although this can be done, we do not think that this will be as effective).

That is why we develop all our sites with this in mind and discuss this with our clients before we commence developing their site.

Part2

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If you are currently considering having a site developed or wish to improve the visibility of your website the please contact us, we are here to help you.

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