infaweb - mobile internet, search engine optimisation

SEO is. . .

Article Publish Date: 13 September 2011

Author: Jon Harrison

I find the following words are generally followed be either very vague or very complex explanations so hear goes for a middle ground.

SEO is Search Engine Optimisation.

Only joking there is more, SEO is a method in which you adjust your website to enable the search engines (Google, Bing, etc) to read you website and place it in its results when people enter certain words/phrases. Part of this includes increasing the importance of your website using external links pointing to your website. (This is a link to my home page.)

So you have a website that sells pens (yes I was looking on my desk and that was the first thing I saw) and you go to Google. You put pens into the search box and click the Google search button.

When the results come onto the screen you look over the page.

The Blue circles are paid adverts so if you want to get listed in these areas you need to look at Google's pay per clicks. Forgetting the blue areas for this article the next section we will look at is the green area. These are companies Google picks using geographical locations it gets from where you are searching from (they have clever pieces of code that find the location relevant to you). Again for this article we will move on. The area we concentrate on for SEO (search engine optimisation) is the orange area. (This area also continues under the green area.) These are what are classed as natural listings and Google uses complex coding to decide which site is number one and which one is number 500.

SEO is about working through the complex coding to make sure your website complies with Google's rules and then improving your website to make it better than the competition. Search engines gives each website and page a level of importance and this is mainly built up by the number of links pointing from external websites to your website.

The key points of what SEO is;

To be at the top of the natural listings for the correct search words/phrases
To improve the importance of your website using links
To make your website follow the search engine rules
To make your website better than your competition