Search Engine Optimisation
What is Search Engine Optimisation?
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the creation of websites that use design, coding, text, and links that search engines most like to see and react to. SEO can be applied to new sites or changes made to existing sites making them appeal more to search engines and thus meaning that these sites are more likely to be displayed at the top of organic search listings.
How does SEO work?
Search engines send out ‘bots’ to trawl your website, in simplistic terms they look at your sites code, content and popularity (links). Search engines continuously change and update their search algorithms, or basically what the ‘bots’ look for and how much weight is given to each particular element.
Within your websites code the ‘bots’ will look to see if your HTML is clean, uncluttered, positioned correctly and easily accessible. To make it quicker for the ‘bots’ to spot your sites main messages, ensure that the most important information is at the top of the page.
Copy is the visible content on your site. Copywriting for SEO purposes means that text should be written in a very specific way, with each of your websites main keywords included seamlessly within the text. Your specific keywords and phases should be placed in locations such as main headers or sub-headings in order for them to score your site highly against that particular search term. Your website will then have a higher relevancy score, related to the search words.
Remember that writing for SEO purposes isn’t just a simple case of just using your keywords as many times as you can, this will not only spam the search engines but make your copy sound horrible to your sites human visitors. There is no point creating a highly ranked website if at the end of the day your visitors don’t convert. Your keywords should be located cleverly, so that your site creates the perfect balance for the search engine ‘bots’ and human visitors alike.
It was popular back when SEO techniques first emerged for web creators to include all of your keywords into meta tags and although they still carry weight the search engines algorithms improve every day and they have become much smarter to this. Now ‘bots’ turn most of their attention to title tags, so make sure your keywords are included there – It’s a must!
Popularity deals with how many links you have inbound to your site. Think of your site as a source of knowledge. The more people that want to link to your site as a point of reference will show the ‘bots’ how useful and respected other people view your content as. If others think highly enough of your site, search engines give your site a higher quality score.
Creating a website containing a good combination of all three elements is a big step in the right direction for giving your sire a much better change of ranking highly within search engines.