SEO is an acronym for “Search Engine Optimisation”. In simple terms, it means improving the navigation, content, and link popularity of your website. This helps your site to be found easily by the search engines and considered relevant for the terms your buyers use to find your products or services.
The more relevant the search engine thinks your site is, the higher up in the results it places your business. Professional Search Engine Optimisation involves ensuring your website gets found in search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo.
Overall, the entire process deals with optimising web pages on your website and other websites, in order to improve the position of your site in the search engine ranking. The level of effort to get to page one in Google can vary significantly. Below are a couple of factors that will impact your search engine page results:
- Your domain name / URL
- The age of your domain name
- Title page
- Page structure
- Keyword density
- The amount of competition in your market
- The number of back links pointing to your site versus your competition
- The quality of back links pointing to your site (the higher the page rank the more powerful the link)
- How relevant the pages are to the search terms the user has typed in
The ultimate goal is to attain a first-page ranking. After all, few people look beyond this first page for results.
Keywords, or keyword phrases, are a critical component of search engine optimisation services. Since search engines are generally concerned with ranking web pages by text, then knowing how to create the text on your site, or in your articles, can have a vast and vital impact on how high your page, or site, ranks.
Why Search Engine Optimisation?
A website’s ranking on search engines (especially Google) is quite important when you take into account the following important statistics:
- 90% of users don’t go past the Page 1 of Google
- 42% of users click on the website on position 1, 12.5% on position 2 and only 8% on position 3
What does this all mean?
This means that if your website is not on Page 1 of Google and in the top 3 positions, then you are effectively missing out on more than 60% of potential visitors (and customers for that matter). That means less traffic or visitors to your site, fewer sales and less profit.
Can you imagine how profitable your business could be if:
- Your prospects found your website at the top of search engine results?
- Your site is found at the time customers are considering buying your product/service?
- All the keyword traffic that is currently going to your competitors, started coming to you instead.