SEO is an acronym for “Search Engine Optimisation” or “Search Engine Optimiser.”
Search engines use the key words and phrases on your website, and a number of factors that are external to your website, to understand what your website is about. More specifically the search engines use keyphrases that you have on each page to determine what that page is about, and look at the pages collectively to understand what the whole website is about (i.e. the site theme).
We know that ideally when a search is done for your products or services using key words on a search engine that you want your website to be presented as close to the top of the list of results as possible, because then of course there is more chance that the searcher will click on the link and come to your website. And it’s really important for your business to appear in the first few pages of results as research shows that when running a search on the Web, about 90% of users click a link within the first three pages of results. The study also found that 36% of users believe that companies who appear at the top of the search results are the top companies in their field. So you want your company name to be in this group!
There are a number of rules and requirements that search engines have in place to determine what keywords they will rank, or list, your website for in their results. The words must be (present at all!) relevant and placed in the correct place and in the correct density on the pages (on-page factors): if the search engine spider can’t find the keywords, or doesn’t consider them important, then you won’t achieve high results in the search engine results pages (SERPs). There are a number of off-page factors that the search engines also consider as important when ranking your website.
So, Search Engine Optimisation or SEO is all about understanding these factors and making continual adjustments (i.e. “optimising”) in order to improving these factors so that your website has maximum opportunity to be included in the first page of search results.
Author: Stuart Wilkerson
Webstrategies
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