What is SEO?
Search Engine Promotion (SEO) is about driving business to your website through search engines such as Google, MSN, Yahoo and AOL.Search Engine Optimisation is about putting all of the elements in place to ensure potential customers find you online. It involves a process of understanding your business requirements and ensuring that these requirements translate to relevant traffic to your website.
Every client and every web site is unique. Equally, all search engines work in a different way, employing their own method and criteria for delivering relevant results to its users. Crucially, if understood, they represent one of the most cost-effective means of generating business and increasing online exposure. With the right package the derived ROI will outperform most other channels.
How it works
Search engines work by collecting and processing enormous, expanding databases or ‘indexes’ of web pages – The likes of Google delivers search results to users from an index of several billion pages!
Google and the other main engines have become increasingly sophisticated, applying complex formulas (algorithms) designed to interpret a web site’s relevance based on user searches. What a user sees and what a search engine sees are entirely different - users see text, images and other media whilst search engines work with code as well as a complex picture of how a web page relates to its surroundings. Where the page is hosted as well as links to and from a web page or website is also scrutinised – amongst many other things!
Based on what it sees, the search engine then applies a relevancy ‘score’ to the page and will rank it accordingly, depending on what the user is searching for.
Achieving results is about ensuring the correct code is in place, t the content is relevant to targeted keywords and that all the other components including website hosting, internal navigation, external linking and submissions to the search engines are accurate and timely.
It is also about ensuring that your technical developers use platforms and software that facilitates a search engine’s access to your site – the wrong decisions can effectively block a search engine’s access to your site. Getting all of these elements right and looking at search engines optimisation as a strategy is key to success.
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