In the world of Internet marketing, website owners are faced with a wide range of options for getting their sites noticed by search engines. But, whatever their choice of marketing strategy, whether it’s the use of PPC, blogs, articles, email marketing or banner advertising, one method they would be wise to consider is SEO (Search Engine Optimisation).
SEO is made up of multiple processes designed to make a website visible to search engines with the aim of getting it ranked as high as possible in search engine listings, and as search engines all have their own criteria for ranking websites, SEO should be seen as an ongoing process if a site is to remain at the top end of search results.
Spiders and Bots
Web pages are periodically read by automated search engine programs called ‘bots’ or ‘spiders’. These programmes crawl websites and read the content before indexing the information and storing it in a giant database. When a search phrase is entered into a search engine, any pages which closely match that phrase are called up and displayed as a search result; the number of pages available can run from hundreds to thousands and some cases millions depending on the popularity of the search phrase used.
Links
Links (especially a high number of links) to a website is generally seen in a positive light because it’s reasoned that if so many other sites are linking to it, then it must be a good site. This is fine providing you are selective in your choices of sites you link to. Linking to non-related businesses won’t bring in your preferred targeted visitors and worse of all it doesn’t look very professional.
Text
The quality of the text or copy on a web page plays a huge part in making one website stand out from another. Good, well-written copy with the right density and balance of keywords and phrases will significantly increase a site’s chances of obtaining a favourable position in search engine listings. Changing the copy on a website from time to time is also regarded as a good thing as fresh content is also favoured by search engines and as such will play a vital part in getting the site ranked higher still.
Others
SEO is an extremely wide-ranging discipline, made up of numerous processes some of which are more involved than others. Other considerations for optimising a site include attention to coding and structure, and the use of site maps is also considered to be good for improving rankings.
Pages that hold too much content may not be fully cached in an attempt to reduce bandwidth and avoid placing too much load on the servers. It’s worth knowing also that the smaller the file size, the quicker the loading time – a definite plus for any website.
Research
What I’ve mentioned so far barely scratches the surface of SEO and the examples used are by no means definitive or exhaustive but merely simple descriptions of sometimes complex processes that are generally considered to be a necessary part of successful Internet marketing.
Until next time.
