SEO – Site Links Online

Search Engine Optimisation

SEO is the buzz word that every marketing person uses, but, many people not in the marketing industry really understand. I intend to explain in plain English some of the basics of what can be a very technical subject to enable you to get the most out of your website marketing for FREE.

Back to Basics

In order to understand SEO, you need to think about how your website (or web page) is found. Skip this next section if you already know how your website gets found.

Search Engines

Any online search tool is a database of websites, but, how does that database get built up? Well this goes hand in hand with DNS (Domain Name Service). When you register the domain name for your website, that domain name goes in a list of domain names that are registered with a registrar. Each of these registrar domain name lists can be sourced, concatenated, and this can form another new list of web pages to look at or “crawl all over”. I will call this list the crawler list.

Search Engine Web Page Crawlers

A program called a “web page crawler” will look at the crawler list of web pages to look at, and identify those it has not seen for a little while, and then go and visit your web page in order to get information that you have made publicly available in order to build the search database. More on this part in a moment. This crawler may follow links to other pages within the website, or, add them to the crawler list in order to revisit at a later time.

Crawling your Website

So the crawler has seen your website, and captured some information. At the most basic level, it will capture…

The title of the web page.
The description of what the web page is about.
Any keywords that you want the search engine to respond to and list your web page for.

However, anyone can put anything in their web page title, description and keywords, that is not exactly what the web page is about, and that is disappointing for the visitor, and frustrating. If a search engine kept giving irrelevant links, then people would stop using that search engine database.

So, to make the search engine have reliable information that the user wants, and so that the user will want to revisit the search engine again and again, the crawler needs to compare the content of what is written in the web page, and ensure it is focused based on the above title, description and keywords, and rank down any web page if the content differs.

Ranking

So, now that we have mentioned ranking, we can now see how relevant the content is, based on the web page’s title, description and keywords. The more text there is, (within reason), on a web page gives the crawler more chance of ensuring that the listing you have in their database is exact, relevant and up to date, and that helps to keep a good web page ranking.

Ranking Key Factors

So, building on the above list of, title, description and keywords, what else do we need to have in order to achieve a good ranking. Here is a list, not in any order of importance…

Have relevant content (based on title, description and keywords)
Have small images that load quickly. Lots of large images or video can impact performance, if this is the case look at clustering or a content delivery network).
Use a secure website with an SSL certificate, ie HTTPS instead of HTTP.
Don’t try to put everything all on one web page. A website is a structured set of web pages. Each page is then focused on delivering your focused message.
Updated content causes the crawler to revisit often and will rank your site higher than stale content.
Any dead links will rank your site lower. Test, test and test.
Link with social media. Get a page on social media, and link the relevant content back to your website providing more focused information for the reader.
Link with other sites, especially ours. We can provide you a FREE listing with title, description and keywords to match and promote your website.

Ranking Number One

So, can I get to the top of a search engine? Be realistic. No. Well, not unless you have a very large multi-national global brand.

However, if you focus your keywords, and your content to mention that geographic area that you do business in, then yes, there is every possibility that you can rank high on a search engine’s database.

Paid For Advertising

Is it worth paying search engines for advertising? Yes. This will complement your SEO, but remember, SEO is about steady organic growth, and paid for advertising is about a quick win return. This is however a different subject and outside the scope of this article.