What is search engine optimisation?
If you have a website but no business comes from it, one of the most likely reasons is that it has not been optimised for search engines. Here is how that works, in plain English rather than geek-speak.
Why it is confusing
Search engine optimisation (SEO) is one of the most important parts of building a website, and one of the most often overlooked. There is a lot of contradictory advice around: some say search engines no longer pay attention to keywords, others that keywords are everything. No wonder website owners do not know whom to believe.
How search engines work
Search engines such as Google and Bing help people find web pages on a subject. Behind them, programs often called spiders or robots visit every website they can reach, read what is on it, and add it to the search engine's index.
When someone types a few words into the search box, the search engine shows an ordered list of results, the ones it considers most relevant first. The higher your website appears, the more likely people are to click on it.
You cannot be on top for every search your customers make, but you can be near the top, or on top, for particular searches. A gift basket company may be first for "Perth gift baskets", tenth for "gift baskets Australia", and nowhere near the first page for "Christmas gift baskets".
What optimising means
Search engine optimisation is building or rebuilding your website's structure and content so that search engines can read it easily and rank it as highly as it deserves, which raises your chances of appearing near the top.
The words and phrases you want to be found for, and optimise your website for, are called keywords and key phrases. Often a great many websites compete for the same keyword, so it is important to choose the right ones: ideally words that many people search for but few websites compete on.
Write for people, with the right words
Search engines read a website differently from people. Clever design and animation do not impress them; mostly they read the text. So choose your key phrases and use them in your text, naturally, where they belong.
Say you sell Motorola mobile phones. If you list every model but never write "Motorola mobile phones" on the page, you will not be found for that phrase. Use it in the page's title and in the product descriptions, and your chances are much higher. Repeating it again and again does the opposite: search engines treat a page stuffed with keywords as spam.
Using the right key phrases in your content is very important, but on its own it will not deliver top results. It is where the work starts.
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