What is Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)?

By Evan Gill


What is the purpose of any web site? Many web entrepreneurs would say that converting sales is the main focus. That would miss the mark a bit. While making sales is a great end result, the primary purpose of a web site is to attract customers. How we do that is where SEO comes into play.

Search engine optimisation, or SEO for short, can be divided into three general areas, all of which contribute to the site's success. Those three areas are content, keywords and coding (HTML). Here we will look at each one briefly and then review.

Content This one is self-explanatory. You will want to keep your web page text relevant to the subject matter. If you are selling widgets, you do not want to focus on hardware. See what I mean? All your page text HAS to be on task and on target with the search terms you are using. This is especially true with folks who use PPC advertising.

Search engines crawl sites and pages every 30 minutes or so looking for relevant material to display. The more relevant your site is, the higher it is ranked in the results from web surfers performing searches. This is SEO at its most basic and it is also the most prolific. Do it yourself or hire an SEO agency to help.

Keywords Keywords are the lifeblood of SEO and they drive the process of getting your website seen more often. These are words that appear on your page numerous times. For instance, say your page is about dog collars. You want surfers looking for dog collars to find you first, so you add the words 'dog collar' to your text a few times. When a web surfer enters that search term, the SE returns your site as relevant to the keyword. This is SEO in it's pure form and it works.

Coding and HTML Many people miss the SEO boat with this one. Too much or excess HTML confuses the search engines. They see all that code and those scripts and styles and they have a tough time getting through it all. Keep your code succinct and compact. Avoid any white spaces and do not overuse tables or tabular rows.

Don't place all types of text links to the bottom of your page just because it looks relevant to your material. It actually detracts from your SEO efforts and lowers your search results.

Conclusion Since the focus of your site is to attract prospects, SEO helps get them there. Any webmaster can do their own SEO or you can hire an SEO Agency to do it for you. All you need to do is keep your main content fresh and relevant, choose the right keywords and clean up the code.

Before you know it, your SEO efforts will pay off in traffic, sales and more new prospects than you know what to do with.




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