Search
Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the practice of improving the website’s internal
and external aspects to increase its relevance, and rank very high on search
engine results for keywords that describe what the website is all about.
The
goal of using SEO is for the website to draw maximum attention from its target
market.
But before that, the website must attain high rankings in the search
engine results page (SERP) for a relevant keyword. This comes from the premise
that the higher the website’s ranking is in the search engine results, the
higher the chance that it will be clicked and visited by visitors.
Ultimately,
if you utilise SEO in marketing your website, you would want your target
visitors to interact with your site by purchasing your product or availing of
your services; requesting for more information about your offers, downloading
your free informational materials, signing up in your newsletter, or just
plainly commenting to your articles.
Companies
and on-line businesses spend alot of money to land on the first page results
for their target keywords. To rank very high for a very competitive keyword,
they hire an SEO specialist and for larger companies, they seek the services of
an SEO firm. This is because landing first on the search engine results page
can be very lucrative to any commercial website. This is due to the fact that
when web surfers go to their favourite search engine and search for a particular
keyword, they usually just click on the first page results and don’t bother
digging through pages and pages of results.
For
example your site sells kitchen cabinets and a web surfer searches for a
kitchen cabinet to buy, you would want that web surfer to find your website on
the first page. Currently, there are 180,000 results for the keywords “kitchen
cabinets” on Google.co.uk. It is therefore crucial for your site to land on the first
page for the surfers to easily or else your site will go unnoticed.
Some SEO
practices that help build the website’s relevance are fixing the website’s html
coding, inclusion of meta tags, improving of the site’s presentation or design,
and overall structure. Poor coding and structure will prevent the search engine
spiders from properly indexing the pages of the site and poor presentation or
design can leave a bad taste among visitors. Usually, a poor design cannot even
hold the visitor for 30 seconds, therefore a high search engine ranking is
irrelevant if the website could not even get the attention of visitors for more
than five minutes.
Another
conscious effort to optimize the website is to fill it with unique,
well-written and interesting content. Unique content are popular among visitors
and are easily indexed by search engine spiders. There is also a bigger chance
that they will be syndicated, quoted or linked to by other websites. It also
helps that relevant keywords are naturally woven into the text for the article
to be fully optimized.
SEO is
used as a marketing strategy by webmasters and on-line business owners. If your website contains what the visitors are looking for, these visitors will easily
convert to regular visitors or customers customers for commercial sites.
However,
SEO does not guarantee return on investment on every site that uses it. Results
vary from one site to another depending on its nature and goals. Results also
vary depending on the change in the search engine’s algorithm, which can affect
sending referrals to your site. Therefore, if you rely heavily on SEO for your
Internet marketing campaigns and rule out other strategies, you may not easily
get the results that you want.
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