What is SEO? ……..SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation and is the process of optimising the content, coding and popularity of a website in order to achieve increased search engine rankings.

Over the last ten years search engines have become an ever-increasing important factor in business promotion. At writing, the three major search engines handle in excess of 700 million queries a day! an outstanding fact that really emphasises the usage of major search engines and the importance of utilising the potential reach of these search engines. An estimated 75% of people now primarily use the internet when looking to buy a product or service. Furthermore, websites in the top 3 pages of the major search engines gain 90% of search engine traffic. Basically this means that if you have an online business your site needs to be on the first few pages of the SERP’s (Search Engine Results Pages) to get the traffic. So do you need search engine optimisation? well, put simply, increased search engine visibility means increased website traffic, increased sales/leads and increased profitability. The question should be- can you afford not to begin Search Engine Optimisation?

How do Search Engines operate?

Everyone with an online business would like to be #1 in Google for their keywords (search queries related to their products or services), however, to achieve this you need to promote your website. So, how do you do this? Well the answer is Search Engine Optimisation. In order to understand SEO you must first understand the basics of how search engines crawl and index websites: Search engines use “spiders” (also known as “robots” or “crawlers”) to crawl the internet, jumping from site to site through the hypertext links found on websites. As they do this they store a copy of the websites they have crawled in a huge database or “index”. When you enter a query into a search engine, it retrieves all the pages from its index that match your query. In order to do this a search engine applies a ranking algorithm (a complex formula) to the sites in its index and displays the results in order of relevance (according to the algorithm). This webpage is an excellent resource, detailing what several seo specialists believe to be involved in the ranking algorithm.

Technical (slightly)….

There are two main phases to the optimisation process; “on page” and “off page”. On page is the alterations that are made to the physical content of a website and the code that makes up each webpage. This includes integrating keywords into areas of the site that the search engines deem important. Off page optimisation is the process of building links to a website in order to increase link popularity. Popularity has played a part in information retrieval for almost 60 years in the form of relative importance via citation. Traditionally, academic and business documents reference other documents according to relevance. In search engine algorithms a link to your site from another is treated as a “vote” and increasing link popularity (in my opinion) is the most important influential factor in increasing search engine rankings. Of course there are many more technical issues involved with Search Engine Optimisation but I wont discuss these in this article. One thing that you should remember though considering SEO as a market strategy is that the process can take many weeks even months to achieve top rankings. This is due to the vast size of the internet and the very nature of how search engines operate.