Many of the SMEketing blog posts focus on search engine optimisation (SEO), but we realised the other day that we’ve not actually formally introduced what search engine optimisation is. If you’re not familiar with the topic, it can appear to be a very complex and confusing subject. Hopefully this series of six concise posts will help make it clear to you what SEO is, why it’s important and how it can be carried out. We’ll be posting these every other day over the course of the next two weeks, so make sure you come back from the next instalment!

What Is SEO?

Search engine optimisation is the process of optimising a website by improving internal and external parts in order to increase the volume of relevant traffic to your site from search engines. It is important to note that it is the increase in ‘relevant’ traffic to your site – there is no point gaining 100% more visitors if they are not the type of visitor that will convert for you (whether your conversion is a sale, request for more information etc…).

Search engines are very clever, and they will be able to find your site without you manually submitting it to them. However, SEO is all about helping you to boost your website rank for the specific keywords or phrases that you feel will convert into good traffic for your site. The online environment has never been more competitive, and this is why SEO is used; optimised sites will have a large advantage over their competitors in terms of visitors and customers.

How do Search Engines Work?
Remember that search engines do not display websites in their search results – they display web pages. This is an important thing to remember when optimising your site.

So how do they work and how do they decide what pages to list and in what order? I’ll try and keep this simple

1. They have ‘bots’ or ‘spiders’ that crawl the web, using the hyperlink structure to ‘crawl’ the pages and document that make up a website
2. The index those pages and documents – basically they store it all in a huge database which they call their ‘index’
3. When someone types a search into the search engine box, the search engine retrieves from its index all the documents and pages that match that query. A match is made in a variety of ways, but mostly it’s determined by whether or not the search term is found in the webpage or document (and in what format – if the searcher put quotes around their search, the search engines would only list pages that contained the query in the exact same format)
4. The search engine will then use its algorithm to work out what order (or rank) to place each result. This is based on what it feels is most relevant to the searcher.

The next instalment (2 of 6), will focus on how search engines decide what a ‘relevant’ site is. Make sure you come back on Wednesday to read all about it! In the meantime, give us an email if you want to find out how we can help improve your website: info@SMEketing.com