What does SEO really mean and how will it benefit you?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation.
Like a lot of things in the business world it really has very little meaning for the majority of the people. Most business owners wouldn’t have a clue what these words mean. On face value, it is a cryptic word that has no logical meaning.
It’s an industry tech term used by web marketing technical junkies to create hype. This is then picked up by smart businesses that can exploit this new found hype and create a market through the use of fear to attract gullible businesses into parting cash for services that really is not a big deal. I will explain below what you can do to make this work for you without spending more than what the job requires.
To understand this first you need to understand what is “Optimisation”… Go Google it – click here. (opens in new tab/window)
What to employ in SEO?
Anyway, let’s have a look at what you can do by employing sensible website features that will have your website or more precisely the webpage rank in the top 100 on a major search engine like Google.com.
A lot of things on the internet are truly coined up by those who have an in-depth knowledge of the technology. Search engine optimisation is one such term and, it is a set of techniques that are used to help your site do better than the competition on search results pages of a search engine.
The Philosophy behind the Search Engines?
Why are they around? Who benefits from their presence?
Firstly, everyone who is in playing the game will benefit and the rewards are high. If you don’t play the game you won’t have any cake.
The search engines, the businesses that have listings on there and the people who are engaged in searching on the search engines are part of this game. Look at it this way. See it as a pyramid. On the top of the pyramid sits the Search Engines (the all seeing eye?), in the section just below them sits the businesses (the few who run the show), and on the bottom section sits the people (who supplies the electricity to keep the Christmas tree lit).
Now turn the pyramid upside down to give the power over to the people because the ultimate power is with the people. Humanity has been duped ever since this analogous pyramid has entered the fabric of life. Well, it is time that we take the control back.
Search Engines are Artificially Intelligent but not Artificial Intelligence!
Any how, Search engines for example Google, Yahoo, Bing, Yandex and others are just like humans and evolve. They evolve in a different way as new information comes they use it to adjust themselves to delivering better results.
It is sufficient to say that search engines are products of human development. Humans work constantly with the algorithms and refine them to do execute much more efficiently at indexing and serving that information. You could say search engines are artificially intelligent and do exactly what they are programmed to do by their human masters.
Search Engine companies and their owners are constantly working and evolving to be the best and they strive to stay in the market to give a better service than their closest competitor. They strive to serve their customers (users – you, me , Tarzan and Jane) instantly with valid, correct and of high quality information.
Imagine for a moment and see what you would do if the quality of these search engines were crap – you would look for another search engine that is better. This is the main reason why Google tops the charts with the best search engine and every business uses its requirements to carry out search engine optimisation.
How does SEO help you and your website rank?
You must understand and experiment and find out how the search engine algorithm works. You have to know what Google, Yahoo, Bing and others want on web-pages.
There are certain elements that are very crucial that must be present on your webpage in order for it to be selected and listed on the search results page. It has been presented that there are more than 200 attributes that the search engines use to rank pages. It would be a big task trying to implement these requirements on any one web-page, however, I can assure you that just implementing a dozen or so of these requirements will help you rank better on search engines.
What attributes are required for good SEO?
This basic information to rank is out there on the web and is presented over and over so many times.
Here is a simple list but one with extremely high value if you know how to implement them.
- The title of the page,
- website design and code,
- the heading within the page,
- the url,
- the physical location of the website,
- the length of the page,
- the use of HTML tags within the page,
- the content and topic of the page,
- the keyword relevance of the incoming links,
- the links that are outgoing,
- the relationship of the other Web-Pages,
- the meta data like the description,
- keywords and the title of the page,
- graphical images and videos on the page,
- the number of links coming to the page,
- cross-linking of pages within the ,
- Website hosting properties ad so forth.
There you have it, the basics and the most crucial SEO attributes. These are basically what you need as a minimum for a good SEO. However, there are some things that will also destroy any chance of ranking and these are over-optimising a page and back links.
Trained and knowledgeable SEO Experts know all this and will develop pages to work on Search Engines without getting penalised. They know what to put out and what to avoid. In most cases the reader will not be aware that such attributes have been applied to a page.
<strong>High Quality Web-pages and organic traffic</strong>
The aim of SEO is to serve an optimised page without compromising the quality of the page. It has to be made in such a manner to make it look and feel all natural. The word natural comes into play here and as such that any person referred from a search engine is called organic traffic.
In our opinion there is really nothing organic about anything that is on a search engine. Search results are tempered and run according to algorithms that are set according to their own liking. It has been tempered with and most businesses who play the game work their butts off to make sure they rank on the search engines. These businesses employ SEO agencies to optimise their websites for the piece of the Grand cake. There you have it, the truth about what SEO is and is not. SEO is nothing but manipulated listings of someone’s data with website links and URLs.
Why the need to play this SEO game?
It’s business and nothing less. Take Google for example, they serve a listing that closely matches your search criteria. Why would Google do this? Not because they love you. They have another agenda, and it is to generate revenue. If you look carefully at web pages, the internet has a see of advertising. This advertising has to be done in a way without looking obvious. Google does it very nicely without looking artificial. They experiment and work in providing natural listing along with competing ads. Frankly, I can’t stand those kinds of pages, you have to keep the content user friendly as much as possible in order to get people coming back.
You’re in the business of marketing your products and services but having it done in a way so that your site or page is ranking quite well on search engines and you have to do this optimisation without compromising your page content and quality.
We SEO experts work backwards by understanding how all this works and how to implement it. We study your market and find what your biggest search terms are. Say, for example you have a painting business. We do our research and find out how people would find you. In other words, what search criteria would be used to find your search engine listing? This is what the SEO expert studies and knows. They create web-pages that serve those search terms.
Is that all there is to SEO? Is SEO easy to implement?
No and no. SEO is a big job. It constantly changes and you need to work constantly in order to stay in the game. It is not an overnight success and sometimes can take anywhere from 1 month to 12 months to see your site being listed on the first page for competitive terms. This document is not about teaching you everything about SEO but it does show you what you need to do in order to continue staying competitive on the web.