Search engine optimisation - the basics
What is search engine optimisation
Natural or organic search engine results |
Three quarters of consumers say they use search engines to find new websites.* With over eight billion pages within the Google database alone, how do you attract the attention of this huge pool of potential customers?
Search engine optimisation or commonly known as SEO, refers to designing and building a website to maximise its ranking within the natural or organic results of a search engine for specific search terms.
The majority of search engines utilise web applications called "spiders" to scan the internet for web pages which are then indexed in their own database. When a user performs a search on the search engine, this database is queried and algorithms are applied to determine the relevance of the page to the corresponding search term(s).
The importance of keyword selection
The single most important factor in any search engine optimisation campaign is your keyword selection. Why is this is important? Because your keywords are the basis for all the methods used to improve your rankings.
There are three important considerations when selecting your keywords:
The keyword must be relevant to your product or service. You may achieve the number one ranking position for the term "telephones" and in turn get bucket loads of traffic from the search engines, but if you sell washing machines you are not likely to generate any sales from these users.
The keyword must be searched. There is no point achieving a top 10 ranking for a keyword if no one is actually searching on it.
Use our keyword popularity tool to estimate how popular some search terms are.
An optimum keyword has minimal competition. If you perform a search on Google (pages from Australia), for the word "computers", over 1.5 billion results are returned. But is all it not lost if you sell computers, it is just a matter of finding a more search phrase, which is relevant to your product or service and is searched on. An example might be "cheap computers sydney" (which incidentally only has about 2 million results in Google)
Try our keyword competition tool to determine the competition for your search terms.
The basics of search engine optimisation
There are both "on page" and "off page" factors which need to be considered to maximise your rankings.
On page factors
On page factors include the placement of your keywords within your HTML and your website copy.
Your HTML should contain your keywords within a number of areas of your code such as:
- title tag
- link text
- meta description
- meta keywords
- heading tags
- bold tags
How well is your site currenlty optimised for your on-page factors? Use our SEO friendliness rating tool to check your rating.
Off page factors
When we say "off page" factors we generally refer to in-bound links (IBLs) to your site. Search engines (and in particular Google) rates the quantity and quality of links coming into your site very highly. Links can be obtained from sources such as search engines, directories, industry and affiliate sites and reciprocal linking.
How many links does your site currently have? How about your competitors? Try our back link counter to see how many links you have.
Confused by some of these words, acronyms and abbreviations? Try our online glossary.
Read about our search engine optimisation methodology
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* Forrester Research
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