Search engine optimisation (SEO) is the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web site or a web page from search engines. The theory is that the earlier (or higher) a site appears in the search results list (based on popular keyword searches), the more visitors it will receive from the search engine.
As an Internet marketing strategy, SEO considers how search engines work and what keywords people search for.
Optimising a website primarily involves:
- Content: editing content and building content which includes relevant keywords
- Reputation: strategically building in bound links to the website. Google doesn’t trust websites automatically. Reputation is judged by the quality of third party links, (websites linking to your website including paid or unpaid links) also referred to as Page Rank.
- Visibility: how easy it is for the search engines to read the HTML /source code of a website. It is important that a website is search engine friendly; this is achieved by removing barriers to the indexing activities of search engines through specific coding techniques. This also includes updating meta tags with keywords such as title, description and alt tags (amongst other things).
Optimising a website also requires pre planning:
- Knowing your market, who are your customers? Where are they? What are they looking/searching for?
- Know your competition, who are your main web competitors? How well are they ranking? What are they doing to optimise their website?
- Picking relevant keywords (search terms) that are likely to generate traffic. What terms are web users likely to search for when they are looking specifically for your products, services or information?
- What action do you want web visitors to take when they hit your website?