What is search engine optimization?

So you are a new website owner and you have your site perfected, you have told all your friends about it, you have told other business about it and you are now just waiting for the customers to come flooding in because they have all seen your site – haven’t they?

You will see nowadays lots of advertisements for SEO; or ‘search engine optimisation’, to the non-technical of us. Basically, SEO is a way of promoting and driving traffic to your website. Using cleverly worded articles, which are keyword rich, and using things called meta tags, amongst a whole range of other techniques, it is possible to generate a greater volume of traffic to your own website through search engines such as Google.
In essence, professionals have worked out how search engines work and how their spiders crawl for the best matches which then bring those searches up at the top of search lists. You will have done your own random web searches before now where you simply type into a search engine the words “cheap designer clothes” and it brings up a list of possible sites. The top sites are the ones that are making best use of search engine optimisation.

How to improve your own SEO

If the service that you offer is relatively unique, then the keywords that you use are likely to be quite specific to your business and will already rank quite highly in a search engine trawl. However, if the service that you offer is highly competitive, then the keywords that you use are likely to be used by millions of other sites. The main focus should be, of course, to build a good website with a quality effect and the rest should follow. However, after that, you should be aware of the usefulness of SEO techniques and how they can work for you.

Updating your website regularly is a must if you are to keep ahead of the game. The experts recommend that you update at least one of your pages at least once a month to keep it fresh and to add in new keywords where possible.

Make sure that you concentrate on the phrase ‘keyword rich’. Although becoming a bit of a cliché, it is important that you recognise its purpose when trying to improve SEO to your own website. But don’t try to do what some people have done in the past and use the same keywords over and over in hidden code on their web pages by using the same font colour as the background in order to disguise them! Search engines such as Google and Yahoo have become wise to this and will discredit you for it.

So you are a flower shop and you are trying to think of good content for your website which will rank you at the top of the search engine listings. Your first job is to think of keywords and phrases which apply to your business. The obvious ones will be flowers, bouquets, weddings, and so on. The less obvious ones might be phrases such as cheap flowers in Coventry, or same day delivery flowers in Coventry. Search engines are looking for good quality websites with useful information; not cheap websites full of meaningless keywords, so keep it interesting and keep the customer in mind at all times rather than trying to ‘fool’ the search engines.

Of course, a web building package will have built in SEO features so that a large element is already done for you. This is one of the advantages of a website builder – you don’t have to worry about the technicalities quite so much. They will use back-links, also known as inbound links – they are basically just incoming links to a website and search engines do favour these.

In essence, SEO is a simple concept with a million and one variations but it is definitely worth knowing a little bit about in order to learn how to improve your own listings and become more successful.

Copyright © Peter Moore 2009 - Co-Founder of EzWeb123.com