An Introduction to SEO

Whether your business is local or global, more and more people are using the search engines to locate services, products and information.

For small business website owners getting found on the Internet and getting traffic from search engines can be a very daunting process, and it is not uncommon for small business owners to pay a lot of money for a website only to find that no one visits.

Search Engines have billions of web pages indexed from websites all over the world, so how will they find yours?

To get your website found you need to optimize your website, and to do that you need a basic understanding of how search search engines work, and how to Optimise your pages and site for the search engines.

 SEO  (Search Engine Optimization) is the process of creating and organising web pages so that they achieve high rankings in the search engine results (SERPS).

Understanding The Serps (search engine results page)

When you go to a search engine for example Google and do a search you type in your search phrase into the search box and click the search button.

The search engine returns a page of search results which is known as the SERPS. The Page has two types of results paid listings and Free or organic listings. The organic listing ( 10 listings) make up most of the page and are located in the centre of the page.

Paid listings are on the right and sometimes on the tip and are clearly differentiated (on Google) by the phrase-sponsored links.

The higher up the SERPs page your site appears for a given search then the more traffic you will receive for that search.

The entire purpose of getting your site optimised is to get more  "free" traffic from the  search engines, by getting your site/page to appear as high as possible on the SERP.

 Organic traffic has the following advantages over paid traffic:

• Searchers are more likely to click on the organic listings higher than those in the paid listing.
• Even taking into account any SEO consultant costs organic traffic is much less expensive than paid traffic.
• Once your site is correctly optimised it will continue to attract free traffic for many years with little work required.

It does however have several disadvantage over Paid traffic:

• It takes time to get.
• It can fluctuate (sometimes drastically) as search engines change algorithms.

SEO can appear expensive and most small business owners are put of by the initial cost, and don’t really appreciate the potential savings that a correctly optimised site can achieve.

In the off-line world the key to a small business owners success is usually its Location, in the  on-line world it is Position-Its position in the Search Engines!

How Difficult is SEO? Can I Do It Myself?

SEO isn't really that difficult as it just involves following a few basic working practises. It can however be time consuming and take time. Getting to the top of Google or any of the search engines doesn't usually happen overnight.

Basic SEO (Search Engine Optimization/Optimisation)

For a basic website the Optimization process is relatively straightforward, as there are only four main factors that effect your web pages position in the SERPS (Search Engine Results Page):

• Your Choice of Keywords
• Your Web page/ site content and Structure
• The links to and from your web site
• Your Competitors

There are two, and only two, ways of optimizing/optimising your website for the search engines:

• On page Optimization- This involves:
  • Keyword Research - Finding and choosing the best Keywords to target
  • Web Page Optimisation- Optimising the web page copy and Meta Tags for the correct keywords.
  • Site structure - Creating an optimized site Navigation structure.
   
• Off Page Optimization- Establishing inbound links via various methods like  directories submission, article marketing,, blogging.

Which Pages Do You Optimize

Ideally all pages will be optimized, but for a typical small business site consisting of a few (<5 pages), then the only one that is worth optimizing is the home page.

For any site, regardless of size, the home page will be the most important page, and should always be optimized.

SEO Course

Coming Soon - A New SEO course for small business website owners. If you wish to be notified just fill out  the form below.

Related Articles:

Local Search For Local Businesses - Local Search will soon be the main method small business get found. If You have a small local business then you must understand it.