SEO made clear

Apparently we all know the importance of having a website to advertise our business on the internet, but if no one is visiting our site because the customer is not keying in the right words into their chosen search engines such as Google, Yahoo, MSN etc then our website is forlornly abandoned on page 40, it may seem pointless and financially wasteful. So how do we get our website known, standing proudly and indeed consistently on the search engines? Well the answer is you need to optimise your site’s content for a search engine. This is known as:

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO.)

Heard about it, but don’t know what it means or how it works – then read on…..

This short article explains SEO in layman terms rather than techie terms and on behalf of a sole trader who decided to invest in it with surprising results. So before you begin, a word of advice - choose your web designer wisely. So many don’t take the time to do proper SEO. It takes time and could take up to 6 months to install properly and effectively but the result will be a sustainable position in the rankings. The basics of code optimisation are just sound HTML coding practices and when followed, go a long way towards SEO

• Said the spider to the fly

How does your site get into a search engine?

A search engine obtains your URL either by you submitting your site directly to the search engine or by others linking to your site. Then, at a time of its choosing, a search engine sends out its computer spider (or “bot”) to visit your site. Once there, the spider starts reading all the text in the body of the page, including headings, title tags and then links to other pages on your web and even external sites. It then copies this information back to its central database for indexing at a later date. The spider then follows the links on the page, repeating the same process, but you have to remember that spiders are dumb and they can’t fill out forms and click on “submit”.

Once the search engine has all your content in its database it runs a mathematical formula, which are unique to each search engine and are constantly changing, but what the search engines are really doing is looking for identified keywords on your pages and they assign a value to these words or phrases based on the code surrounding the words.

Are you still with me?

What are these keywords or key phrases? They are words relevant to your business and the content of your website. Despite the popularity of individual words, its best to target 2 or 3 word phrases on a page by page basis i.e. your header and body text should consist of a couple of sentences on every page building to around 250 words into key category pages. In addition to content, the search engine looks for what other sites and/or pages on the same site are linking to that page. The more links to a given page, the more important that page is.

If this rather condensed explanation has left you more confused than ever why not leave the “know how” to your website designer and concentrate on other practicalities like “will this system bring more serious visitors to my site” and “how much will it cost me?”