What is Search Engine Optimisation?
You can’t own or be involved with a website without coming across search engine optimisation (SEO) at some point or other.
Every day I receive another email via a contact form on one of my websites offering SEO services from one of many firms in India. So what exactly is SEO?
In order to to help users find what they are looking for, search engines such as Google and Bing must decide what web pages are most relevant to what people are searching for. By applying a good SEO strategy when building and marketing your website, you can do your best to ensure that when people search for information, your web pages appear near the top of the search engine results pages.
SEO can be seperated into categories, on-site SEO and off-site SEO.
On Site SEO
On-site SEO should be a consideration when building your website. If your site is built using a content management system (CMS) such as WordPress, then this is pretty much just a case of installing an SEO plugin such as All In One SEO Pack.
When writing content for your website, you would typically perform some keyword research first. Keyword research is a pretty deep subject itself, well beyond the scope of this article. If you want to know more about keyword research, check out Moz’s excellent article here.
Once you’ve decided on a good keyword, this is used throughout the content of the article, as well as in the title, META tags etc.
Off Site SEO
Once you have written and published an article on your website, you will need to start building links to it. Search engines such as Google see external links pointing to your website as votes of confidence. The more links you have, and the more relevant those linking pages are to your page, the more chance you have of your pages ranking will in the search engine results pages.
If you have written good, compelling content, then in theory you shouldn’t need to build links to your website. However in practice, it makes sense to tip the scales in your favour and work hard to achieve some good quality backlinks.