Search Engine Optimisation
Making your website figure as high as possible in the search results
- Generate Lots of Free Traffic to Your Site
- Let Future Customers Find You Easily
- Reduce Marketing and Promotion Costs
The objective of Search Engine Optimisation is to ensure that a website is as clearly visible to the search engines as possible and returned as high as possible in the search results for relevant searches.
Many people would love you to believe that Search Engine Optimisation is some form of black art.
Don’t believe them!
It’s not.
But in any case, you’re far better off concentrating on the quality of the content on your site than on whatever the search engines may think of it.
To make your business successful you need to focus on your business. Not the search engines!
The Search Engines’ Mission
The search engines all see their mission as providing the most relevant results possible to people searching for information on the Internet.
Google has been particularly successful in this and, over the past several years, has raised the bar continuously on the quality of search results by focusing on relevance.
Relevance is the term used to mean that a search result is totally relevant to what the searcher was looking for.
In order to achieve high rankings for their sites in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS), many webmasters started attempting to analyse the search engine algorithms and then adjust their websites to meet what they thought were the Search engines’ criteria.
This led to web pages and web sites being written for the search engines, rather than for real people, and many of these sites read very badly to the average viewer as a result.
This desire to rank well in the SERPS also resulted in the development of ‘black hat’ SEO techniques.
These are techniques that are developed in order to deliberately fool the search engines into believing the site in question is highly relevant to the search.
As a result of these two trends the search engines now continually fine-tune and adjust their search algorithms. Their purpose in doing this is two-fold:
- To continually improve the relevance of the search results they provide to searchers
- To negate the efforts of the ‘black hat’ SEO specialists.
Search Engine Optimisation is, therefore, a dynamic environment.
In fact Google, alone, makes between 400 and 500 algorithm updates a year.
Which is why it’s important to focus on your business. If you try to keep up with the search engines you’ll have no time for your business.
Today, the importance of relevance in search engine results means that there are three points that it’s important to achieve in optimising a website for the search engines:
- Good quality, frequently updated content that the search engine spiders can easily find and read
- Correct use of the accepted standards (META and semantic tags) to effectively tell the search engines about the site and its content
- A high number of incoming links from good quality sites in the same or similar industry categories to the site in question
There are other factors, but focusing on those 3 areas as a starting point forms the foundation of a well optimised website.
Steps that can be taken
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) broadly falls into 2 categories:
- On page (or site) SEO
- Off page SEO
On page SEO relates to how a website is set up, the content it contains and how effectively that content is displayed to the search engines.
Off page SEO relates to what the Internet at large ‘thinks’ of the site. This has traditionally been determined by the number and type of links that a site attracts, but is increasingly being affected by your social media activities.
Any website SEO project must address both on page and off page SEO to be effective.
I’ve written a series of articles on Search Engine Optimisation – you can find them here.
Contact me
For more details on how I can help you improve your website’s performance in the search results contact me here, or call me on +852 9238 9998.
