What is Search Engine Optimisation?
What is a Search engine?
Search Engines are a very powerful online searching tool. The great majority of people who are looking for information on the web use search engines and of these, Google is by far the most used ‘keyword’ search engine. Google’s search engine market share varies from country to country, with recent reports giving it approximately 72% search market share in the US, and even higher in several European countries.
Search engines rank their results according to their relevance and popularity with their unique complex ranking algorithms. These algorithms use several factors of an online document to determine its ranking. Since every search engine has its own unique algorithm the weight it gives to the some factors may be different when compared to other search engines, thus the order of results varies across different search engines although they have similar overall functionality and layout.
Google is currently the most accurate and successful search providing relevant organic search results.
SEO
The acronym SEO short for Search Engine Optimisation is the art of website optimisation to increase the visibility in the search engine results page (SERP). SEO emerged since website ranking at the top results achieved a lot of traffic via search engines. Therefore the focus of SEO is to increase the ranking of web pages in the organic listings which is the most important part of the search engine results page (SERP). SEO is a part of Search Engine Marketing (SEM) also known as search marketing. SEM combines activities such as SEO, paid inclusion and PPC.
Google claims to use over 200 plus ranking factors – the situation is further complicated by the fact that search engines such as Google continually update algorithms. Google almost rolls out an update every day!
Website Optimisation
A website when it undergoes SEO activities must be optimised for both On-Page factors and OFF-Page Factors. Throughout our search engine process we use ethical white-hat SEO techniques. Search engines have developed algorithms to detect and penalise websites employing black-hat techniques. Therefore white-hat SEO may give benefits in a longer plan but is more worthwhile.
On-Page Factors
On-Page factors are elements and the content on the page. These include html tags such as heading tags, title tags, text modifiers and so on. On-Page optimisation also focuses on the other elements of the structure of a website such as a website’s linking architecture. Content is also a very important element on the page, search engine algorithms employ complex algorithms to determine the value or uniqueness of contents such as Latent Semantic Indexing.
OFF-Page Factors
Off-page factors include activities which promote the website on the Internet. Getting inbound links to a website is a key ranking factor. Search engine algorithms have several factors to determine a backlink’s score and thus quality is an important factor. Many links of low quality may pass no SEO benefit while one link from an authoritative good source may pass important link brownie points.
SEO Services
It is immediately obvious that getting onto Google is vital for online success. However this is not as straightforward as one might think - 84% of users only go through the first two pages of Google's search results – in other words to get some Google traffic, you need to rank in the top 20 search results for your target keywords!
Attempting to bypass this statistic by investing in sponsored links is an option - however this is not as effective as ranking on the first two pages, because only 35% of searchers ever click on sponsored results. Getting to the top of the regular, unpaid search results is nowadays a make-or-break target for your business!
Times at the moment are hard, and when the competition gets tough, it is important to respond in kind! If you want to market your products and services online, get more traffic and promotion, you have to join the Google bandwagon, and the aim of our SEO packages to help get you there!