Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
When you eventually get your website online there are many different ways for your target audience to find it – advertising campaigns, corporate stationery, through social media or word of mouth. But for your website to be easily found it must appear in the listings of the popular search engines, and that’s where search engine optimization comes in.
When somebody types a word or phrase into a search engine, they receive a list of web pages relevant to their search. Search engines like Google use incredibly complex, highly secret and ever changing algorithms to sift through billions of web pages to determine which web pages are relevant for particular searches. The most relevant ones are returned first to the searcher.
If someone were searching for an arbitrary phrase like “rotary washing line” they would see that 598 million relevant page results are returned. So if your company happened to sell that product and you wanted your website to appear on the first page of search results returned to the searcher, you have your work cut out!
What search engine optimization is about is letting the search engines know what each and every page on your website is about so that it can determine its relevancy.
The algorithm will take many different elements into account – the domain name, the title of the page, the text and tag content on the page, in-bound and out-bound links, recency – and weight them all to determine how relevant your web page is for particular searches.
If your existing website is not showing up in the search engine results for key search phrases you would expect your target audience to be using, then optimizing your site for those phrases is a priority. Most people find what they are looking for on the first page of search results and very few look further than the first few pages of results before trying a different search phrase, so even if your website appears on page 5 or 6 of the results, it still may not be found.
Putting an ongoing SEO strategy in place for your website is a crucial part of its success. Researching the search habits of your target audience and knowing exactly the phrases they are using in your market will help you to optimize your website so that it becomes more relevant for those key phrases over time.
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