Search Engine success doesn’t happen overnight – it takes effort, perseverance and patience. This guide serves as a basic Introduction into the world of Search Engine Optimisation .
Search Engine Optimisation is a vast subject area, and this three part series will only really scratch the surface of SEO. What follows is a simple introduction to search engines, how they work and how best to attract lots of visitors to your website.
Introduction
If your reading this you’ve probably heard about search engines… that is unless you’ve been living in a cave for the last 10 years! Search engines have grown at much the same rate that the Internet has to become an essential part of the everyday browsing experience.
Typically around 80% of website visitors come from search engines, so it’s essential to do all you can to get your site ranking well if you want lots of visitors to your site.
The ultimate goal is to attract as many of the right kind of visitors to your site as possible – supplying them with the information they are looking for, whilst converting those visitors from browsing into taking action, whether it be subscription to a newsletter, an enquiry, or a sale.
There is no magic pill
One of the common misunderstandings of SEO (Search engine optimisation) is that it’s a piece of cake to get your site to number one in the SERP’s (Search Engine Results Page)… if that were the case then we would be out of a job! Seriously though, achieving a high ranking on google or any of the other big search engines is the result of careful planning and a consistent investment of time, skill, money and hard work.
Whether you’re planning on performing your own SEO or hiring professionals, it certainly helps to have an understanding of the basics to get the most out of your time and money. Beware of the firms guaranteeing you a top spot in the SERP’s, if it sounds too good to be true it usually is. There is no way of guaranteeing SEO success, however this guide should help give you an outline of what its all about.
So what is a search engine?
Search engines index websites in order to make it easier for a user to find what they’re looking for. Although there are hundreds of search engines; Google, Yahoo, and Bing are who most companies target their SEO for as they are the key players. In truth, for true global domination of the SERP’s, Google is all you need to worry about as they account for 86.3% of the market share, performing a staggering 400 million plus searches every day.
How do search engines work?
Search engines use special software called ‘spiders’ or ‘robots’ (don’t worry they’re not as creepy as they sound!) to constantly ‘crawl’ around the web. These ‘spiders’ visit web pages by randomly following links from other websites ‘indexing’ the text content it finds in the search engine’s database.
If you have a website online, eventually a search engine spider will come across your site and index it in it’s database along with billions of other websites. This process can be sped up by directly submitting your site to the search engines… here is the link for google site submissions.
Then when a user enters ‘keywords’ such as ‘website design Birmingham’, the search engine then goes and finds all the pages that mention or contain that phrase, and then ranks them in order of relevance shown ten at a time… all of this in the space of a few milliseconds. Phew!
So how does a search engine decide which website to rank where?
To put it simply, the search engines goal is to deliver the highest quality, most relevant results to the users query. However with billions of pages to sift through, the search engines have to make tough decisions about which sites are going to provide the user with the most accurate information and which order to put these sites in.
In order to decide, the search engines use a complex mathematical algorithm based on rather a lot of complicated factors. Most users don’t look beyond the first page of results, and even fewer go past the second page, meaning it is vital to ensure your website is ranking for the ‘keyword phrases’ that are most valuable to your website.
So how can I improve my websites ranking?
Well, SEO falls into two broad sections, on-site optimisation (aspects of your website you can improve in order to increase your chance of high rankings) and off-site optimisation (gaining links from other websites back to your own) both of which will be covered in more detail over the next couple of posts.
In the mean time, feel free to get in touch with us if you want to discuss anything SEO.
Until next time, happy optimising!