About SEO
So what's this SEO all about then...
Just when you think you're doing
fine another pesky
little digital acronym comes along to throw you off balance...SEO or
search engine optimisation is the optimisation of websites so that they
appear at the top of the natural search results in search engines.
The importance of SEO...
You've spent hours and many pennies creating your website.
It's sitting proudly in cyperspace - surely the search e
ngines
will find it? To a certain extent they will but you've got
competition - stiff competition. Thousands of pages will rank
above you for your key terms. The lower down the ranks you
fall
the less visits and clicks you'll get.
An SEO stat attack...
Some key stats to whet your appetite:
- An estimated 85% of all traffic comes from search engines
- Average conversion rate from natural search is 3.13% (Clickz)
- 13% of companies invest more than £50,000 in SEO every year
- 61% are planning to increase SEO budget (Econsultancy)
- 90% of all users don't look past the first 30 results
- Most only view the top ten results
- SEO is the most cost effective form of digital advertising - period.
- Google, Yahoo & MSN account for 80-90% of all search traffic
About the search engines...
Google is the big daddy so where he goes the rest follow.
Search Engine Market Share
How do search engines work...
- Search engine spider “crawls” the web to find new documents.
- Search engine indexe the content (text, code) in their database
- Search engines rank the page using an algorithm (math formula)
- The algorithm is top secret to the search engines!
- The algorithm is constantly tweaked, updated and changed
- The spiders are always out there searching for content
What are the search engines main goals?
- Accumulate large index (database) of web documents to search
- Provide highly-relevant results to users (better than competitors)
- Generate revenue via paid advertising and business ventures
It's important to remember these goals because search engines will view your web pages with these goals in mind.
What do search engines like?
Think about a 20:40:40 rule
 |
 |
|
|
Technical/Design
|
Content
|
Link Popularity
|
SEO Walls
Search engines can't...
- •Choose from a drop down or hover menu
- •Click on a submit button
- •Use a search box
- •Follow javascript like a human visitor
- •Read an image or graphic
- •Read sites built using frames
- •Read password protected pages
- Read Flash, AJAX or other complex development techniques
- •Read dynamically generated content & querystring urls e.g.
http://www.boots.com/onlineexperience/flexible_template_2006.jsp?
classificationid=2&wblinktype=DD&dept_Name=beauty%20a_sb_rtoiletries
SEO Speed Bumps...
Search engines are lazy when it comes to...
- Reading through loads of code to get to the text at the bottom
- Reading any document that’s not HTML e.g PDF, Word
- Microsites (or rather I am)!
Why are you asking me to optimise a microsite when you can put the content in the your main site that's already optimised!
Go to jail and do not pass go if you...
- Cloak
- Keyword stuff
- Buy links from link farms
- Duplicate text content from elsewhere
So that about does it for now - but be warned it could all change in an instance! But that's my job to find out just what the search engines are doing and to tell you what you should be doing to maximise return on investment. Check out my SEO consultancy services.
