Quite simply, Search Engine Optimisation or SEO is the process of making your website more search engine friendly, and thus appear on the search engines. This drastically increases the visibility of your website and rapidly increases traffic.
Firstly, it is important to note that if you want your website rank well, in a consistent manner, then one must follow the guidelines laid out by Google. Failure to do so is often met with severe ‘punishments’. For instance, the search engine giant may choose not to index your website if it finds you in breach of its regulations. Therefore, it is advised that you either engage in an extensive period of research, whereby you fully understand the rules and methods to optimise your website, or you hire a professional SEO agency.
The ultimate goal search engine optimisation is to create a website that has a real purpose, providing relevant content, information or service, and is able to be read by Google. Generally speaking, there are two factors which impact this: on-page and off-page optimisation.
On-Page Optimisation
It is commonly acknowledged that ‘content is king’. In essence, this means that without high quality, relevant content your website is doomed to fail. This is for two fundamental reasons; firstly, it is very unlikely that a potential customer will buy from or use a website with poorly written content. Secondly, if your content is not wrote with search engines in mind, it may be decided that it is not relevant to the term that you want to target.
Additionally, if you want to have your website noticed, it is important that your copy is unique. In other words, if your website is entirely composed of duplicate content, search engines will often fail to display your website as they prefer diversity in its SERP’s.
Finally, if you have quality content on your site, you will find it a lot easier to do the second aspect of SEO. For instance, if you have a quality article talking about solar panels, other companies, bloggers and pages will want to link to it.
Off-Page Optimisation
In addition to the On-Page optimisation, it is also important that you generate inbound links from other websites. However, this is not an easy process. It has now been widely accepted that link-directories and link-farms are largely useless.
Nevertheless, there is hope. Search engines now a place great emphasis on social media networks, bookmarking services and blogs. Thus, here at Net66, we think that one of the best ways to generate interest in your website (and the resulting links) is to write a high quality blog that people want to talk about and share. This can be utilised for any field and can truly grow your business.
While this post is far from exhaustive, it does offer a quick insight to the complex and ever-changing world of search engine optimisation.
