What is SEO?
There are many companies around that know they need to make the most of the internet and need a better web presence.
After a bit of research they discover that “SEO” services are what they need to utilise if they want to start producing business from their website.
SEO in a nutshell
SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimisation” and is the process of making your websites pages rank highly in the search engine results for the keywords that you want to target.
There are many methods and techniques that can be used to help your website rank well in the search engines, some are good and some are bad. Some techniques can actually damage your sites ranking potential for the long term.
SEO can be split into two elements.
1. Onsite optimisation
2. Offsite optimisation
Onsite optimisation
Onsite optimisation is an important factor in helping your websites pages rank well for your targeted keywords.
This part of the SEO process concentrates on setting up your sites to be Google and search enginge friendly.
There are many factors that the search engines look at when they are looking at placing websites on their results pages for each search term.
Each search engine reviews all of the websites on the internet and makes a log of what each site is about and what relevance they have for particular keywords. They do this by sending out their “spiders” who go out into the web and pull all of this data that the search engines then store away in their databases and draw their results from this database when a search is carried out by anyone using their sites search facility.
You can now see why it is vital for you to setup your website or blog correctly and enable the search engines to spider your site and draw the information from it that YOU want them to know.
There are many ways that you can optimise your site correctly and stand the best chance of the spiders finding the correct information on your site.
Some of the important areas of your site that need to be covered are:
1. Your content – Make sure that your content mentions the keywords that you want to target and make sure that your content is always 100% original and fresh.
2. Title tags – This content is added at the back end of your website and is the one or two sentences that you will see in the bar at the top of your website browser.
3. Meta tags – These are also filled in at the back end of your websites system and allow you to place descriptions of your website and which keywords that your pages are targeting.
Offsite optimisation
Offsite optimisation is mainly about getting back links into your website.
Back links are links from other sites that point to your site and in the eyes of the search engines are considered a vote from these sites.
For more information on back links, what they are and where you get them from, please visit our back linking article.