Search engines are nothing new, the first one was created in 1990 and called Archie, short for archive. Since then a few have come and gone whilst others have come on leaps and bounds.
Google is by far the most widely used search engine. It took the best part of 6 years for Google to overtake Yahoo! at the top of the charts and it hasn’t looked back since.
Search Engine Optimisation or (SEO) is the process of affecting the visibility of a website in a search engine’s “natural” or “organic” (not paid for) search results.
Search engines base the decision of the order in which these results display (otherwise known as ‘rankings’) on a wide range of criteria, technically known as algorithms. The challenge you’ll face is that the search engines change their algorithms regularly , and this in turn affect your search engine ranking and can be the difference between being in the top 5 results, to not even being on the first 5 pages.
Well written, quality content, makes a difference between a regular website and one that dominates the search engines.
Every time you add a new article or a page of new content, be sure to use the Google keyword tool to determine which keywords and phrases people are using to run searches in Google.
Make sure your website is responsive. This means it needs to work correctly on mobile and tablet devices.
META Tags (Title and Description tags) are still an important factor. Every page on your website should have unique META Tags associated with them.
SEO takes time and isn’t something that will happen overnight. Having a strategy in place is the best way forward, making sure you set realistic goals over an achievable period.
This is one of the oldest spam tactics in the book. You should never use too many keywords within your content.
The content you write for your website needs to be unique and not just copied and pasted from another source. Duplicating content will be penalized by Google.
You need to make sure your website loads quickly. Sites or individual pages that tend to take a long time to load will eventually become problematic not just from a users’ point of view, but also from Google’s.
Cloaking is a technique that creates two versions of a single website, one version for the users and another for the search engines. The version seen by the users is filled with relevant user-friendly content while the site viewed by crawlers is keyword and meta tag stuffed. This technique needs to be avoided.
Buying links is when you pay other people to link to your website. It’s not good practice and it’s also a direct violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.
Is your website search engine optimised? Need help optimising your website? Get in touch today!
