SEO Explained
SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION
There’s a very good reason that so many organizations take search engine optimization very seriously: in fact the best-looking websites with the highest quality content don’t always produce enough inquiries and sales. Therefore here’s a useful introduction to search engine optimization, and some details of GTASEO’s approach.
What happens when someone uses a search engine?
Search engines constantly send “spiders” out across the internet. These spiders look at billions of webpages on a daily basis for the words or phrases that have been typed into the search engine. Pages that the spiders recognize as containing the relevant words and content are recorded on their database of links.
This database – and not the internet as a whole – is the place that the search engine looks at each time someone starts a search. Links within this database are ranked according to their relevancy to each specific search word or phrase.
How does SEO improve a site’s chance of ranking highly in search results?
As you can see from the paragraph above, it’s essential that when spiders visit your site they can easily find the keywords and phrases that people most often use when searching. If spiders find plenty of these words on your pages you will rank highly in subsequent search results.
SEO OBJECTIVES
SEO is about meeting three main objectives:
* Identifying appropriate keywords and phrases.
* Making sure spiders can find them on your site
* Getting inbound links form other relevant online sources
Here are some of the ways that SEO activity can achieve your objectives:
1. Constant monitoring of the algorithms that search engines use.
These are the parameters that decide whether a site appears at the top of the rankings for a particular search term. Only dedicated search engine optimization experts can do this as the parameters are changing all the time – web designers simply don’t have the time to keep track of what’s happening, and nor should they because their speciality is in website design, not website SEO.
2. With the parameters in mind, the development of keywords and key phrases for the relevant site.
This often means describing your products or services in a way that potential customers do, which might differ from your own corporate terminology. (See our page on keyword research and analysis for more information on this.)
3. Once the keywords and key phrases have been agreed on, making sure the site content incorporates them correctly.
This is partly about ensuring the keywords are included in appropriate places on each page. For example, most search engine spiders look at the headline and first paragraph of each page rather than a paragraph at the bottom of the page. They also tend to look at the names of links too, so that’s another place to incorporate keywords and phrases.
4. Do some clever HTML coding.
As well as writing the text for the page, some clever HTML coding has to be done to further increase the chance of searches scoring your site highly.
5. Do as much as possible to ensure other appropriate sites links to your site.
One way to do this is through manual submissions to directories, but it also helps to have credible non-directory sites feature your site too. For example, if you are a member of a trade organization it will probably be a good idea to be linked to from its website. Taking advantage of social media optimization can also not be ignored.
6. Continue to monitor the site’s search engine performance.
This monitoring will enable changes to be made as required to further improve search engine results.
The need for SEO specialists
If you were in any doubt about the need for SEO specialists, the list above hopefully demonstrates that proper optimisation is a significant undertaking that requires specialist skills and knowledge, as well as many hours of time.
It’s also a long-term process rather than a one-of activity, so it would be hard for most people to continually make the time to do it, whereas a dedicated SEO company can focus exclusively on it on behalf of its customers.