Search Engine Optimization – SEO for short, is the art of creating web pages so that the search engines will find them attractive for a particular keyword or phrase, preferably a word or phrase that is central to your business.

SEO is extremely important because it directly affects the likelihood of a potential customer finding your website when they go to the search engines to look for something; be that information, goods or services. And here’s the clinch – the better optimized your site is for a keyword or phrase, the more likely it is that it will be found when someone is searching for that term.

Since Google is by far the most important search engine in the world, I am going to talk about SEO in relation to Google, but rest assured, SEO works pretty much the same in all search engines.

As a business owner looking to get potential customers to your website, there are three main kinds of traffic you can get through Google.

1. Organic Traffic, i.e. free traffic, which are the results that show in the main area of the search page after a search term is entered in Google.
2. Paid search traffic, which are listings that look like little advertisements, these are usually on the right hand side of the page (and sometimes at the top of the page highlighted in yellow). And finally
3. Content Network Traffic, which is ads that Google places on websites that have an agreement with Google to run their ads on their website.

If you have been online at all, you will have seen all of these traffic sources, and if you have a website or are an online advertiser, your capacity to appear in these results is directly influenced by the SEO of your website.

With organic traffic the Search Engine Optimization relationship is definitive. By that I mean 100% of the likelihood of your web page being shown in response to a search is based on the SEO score Google gives your site in relation to the search term that the user has put into the search engine.

So how does Google come up with an SEO score for your website? NOBODY KNOWS EXACTLY (except the good folk at Google) and the way they configure their search ranking algorithm is regularly changed. Google does this so that people cannot manipulate their websites to obtain better search engine rankings.

However, this being acknowledged, there are a number of known factors that certainly influence the SEO ranking Google gives a site. At the broadest level there are two factors that Google considers, ‘on site’ and ‘off site’ SEO.

On site factors relate directly to the content on your site. In a nutshell Google looks at elements on your site like the page title, headings, content, meta tags, url, navigation elements and the like to quantify what your site is about.

In some niche markets where the players in the market are unsophisticated in their knowledge of the internet, it’s actually possible to get a page 1 ranking in organic search results for niche keyword phrases just by doing a good job of optimizing your ‘onsite’ SEO elements, and I have achieved that for many of my clients.

‘Off site’ factors relate to links to your website from other websites. Basically links to your website are regarded as a ‘vote’ for the quality of your site, and the more votes you get, the higher Google assumes your relevancy is for whatever topic your site is about.

Not all votes are considered equal however. If a site that Google ‘likes’ (ranks highly) links to your site, that link has greater value than the link from a site that Google give a lesser importance too.

Relatively speaking, off site SEO factors have more weight than onsite factors, however it is unlikely that you will achieve a No 1 ranking on Google for anything without having well optimized onsite factors. To be an authority site for any particular topic you really need both ‘onsite’ and ‘offsite’ factors working for you.

Now I’d like to relate all this back to web design for a moment and let you know that even though you would naturally assume that all web designers should or would understand search engine optimization, most of them don’t. How come? Because most of them are graphic designers, and their area of expertise is in making things look nice, not SEO or how to plan and build a website to maximize sales.

This is a big trap for business owners when they engage someone to help build their website. Most assume that something as important as this would be looked after for them by the web designer and in most cases it isn’t. This oversight can be devastating because, as far as I’m concerned, a websites most important function is selling, so it’s extremely important to your potential online success that your web site is built by someone that knows and understand SEO, because if they don’t, the future success of your website is jeapordised.

Inadequate SEO means that from day one there is a ‘glass ceiling’ restricting how successful your business can be online, (specifically, inadequate SEO architecture) and if you ever want to burst through it, you will most likely need to rebuild your website all over again. What a waste of time and money!

So do yourself a favour and heed the wisdom of this very old saying, “if you’re going to do something, do it right the first time”! As far as building websites goes, that means getting your on site SEO right, right from the start. Your then ‘building on the rock’, and your website will only improve in the search rankings as it ages.

Til next Time

I wish you every success in Business

David Mollet