Search Engine Optimisation; Frequently Asked Questions.
What is Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
Why is search engine traffic so important?
What are spiders / crawlers / robots?
Is optimisation a difficult task?
How do I go about optimising my website?
What are the typtotical optimisation techniques?
How long will it take before I start ranking better?
What is Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)?
SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is a method of designing, writing, programming, and scripting an entire Web site to increase the chances of your Web pages appearing at the top of search engine queries when a searcher types in selected keywords related to your company's products or services in a search engine such as Google, Yahoo, MSN etc.
Why is search engine traffic so important?
A very large percentage of people looking for stuff on the Internet find what they're looking for through search engines such as Google, Yahoo, MSN etc. Given that most people will only browse through 20 or 30 results in order to find what they're looking for, it is important that your website ranks highly in the search results, otherwise you risk loosing a vast amount of traffic to competitors.
What are spiders / crawlers / robots?
The terms "spiders", "crawlers" and "robots" all refer to a computer program which is designed to browse websites and download information. The information that it usually downloads is the HTML source code. In the case of search engines, this source code is stored in a large database and later analysed.
Is optimisation a difficult task?
No, but it requires a lot of work and patience. The work part involves making the changes to your HTML code manually, which can take a while. The patience part involves nothing more than waiting and monitoring the results of your optimisation in search engines.
How do I go about optimising my website?
Firstly, you need to have the correct tools at hand. Such tools would include keywords density analysers, server header checkers, Meta tag analysers, spider simulators etc. Such tools can be found in abundance on the Internet.
Next you will need to decide for exactly which search terms you wish to optimise your site for. It is extremely difficult to optimise a site for more than 3 or 4 search terms. Do some research with some keyword suggestion tools and try to discover which search terms both currently bring you the most traffic, and which ones are most used by web surfers.
The exact optimisation procedure varies by search engines and it changes over time. For the latest tips on optimisation for any given search engine, check out web sites like search engine watch. After you find out what changes you need to make, employ those changes to your site / HTML code. More often that not changes will need to be made to the directory structure of a website, along with changes to filenames and resources.
What are the typical optimisation techniques?
Use of META tags (part of the HTML code of a web site) to supply information such as keywords, site description and title etc. to spiders / crawlers or other robots that are looking for alternate information. Some search engines no longer use these tags but some still do.
Use of titles on pages (titles that appear at the top of the browser window) for ranking highly in the search engines.
The use of Heading Tags (part of the HTML code of a web site) to add headings that appear at the top of your page containing words related to the keywords that you are targeting for rankings.
Use of Alt Tags - This text is the line of text you see pop up (in Internet Explorer) when you place your cursor over an image. This area should be used to describe images as is indexed by the search engines.
Web site Content - Content weighs is considered one of the primary areas of search engine optimisation and marketing, hence the expression. Your content should be written in a way that grabs the users attention, while utilising your targeted keywords and keyword phrases.
How long will it take before I start ranking better?
Generally speaking the search engines update once a month. However, because the information presented in a given update gets crawled a few weeks previous, it can take as long as 6 to 8 weeks before changes to your site will be reflected in search engines. Some search engines, such as Google, are making some rapid changes in technology, which allow them to update their database faster, sometimes within 24 hours. Sometimes you will be lucky enough to get a quick update, and sometimes not.
Unethical SEO is a term that is used to describe search engine optimisers, or the optimisation of a website which uses any form of spamming or tricks in order to falsely improve rankings. For example, the use of hidden text or doorway pages as mentioned above would be considered unethical search engine optimisation.
