There can be much confusion for people new to the concept of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), just what is it? How can it help your business? Is it required even if your site is already appearing in search engines? This article will look at the job of SEO, explain how it can benefit every company with a website and with modern commerce continuing to move online, how it will become an essential tool for all businesses.
SEO is the process of trying to get a site to 'rank highly' for a popular keyphrase. Keyphrases are the text that people type into search engines when they are looking for products and services. For example, a person looking for new shoes may type something like "smart shoes london" if they are looking for a shop in that area. So a shop in that area with a website might try targeting that keyphrase.
So how does a site target a keyphrase? Primarily this is down to having relevant and unique content relating to that keyphrase. So a page using "smart shoes london" in the title would be a good start. Then it needs to be filled with quality information that other people will want to look for.
That is not all however; SEO is also the process of analysing whether the structure of a site is properly optimised to allow search engines to 'crawl' it. Crawling is the process of automated robots (generally referred to as 'bots' or 'web spiders') that move from page to page following links in order to 'discover' new web pages. This is a 'natural' for search engines to find a website, they travel from one site to another in attempt to become aware of as much of the web as possible. The problem comes however, if a site has very poor internal linking, or the links are performed in a way that doesn't allow the bots to properly analyse the site. SEO companies know that having a site that is properly 'crawlable' not only helps with the indexing of pages, but can also help with other aspects of SEO such as the much discussed 'page rank'.
Although not currently as high profile as website design, SEO is becoming more and more important to a variety of businesses. With many companies trading exclusively online now the processes that allow those companies to be place at in front of the eyeballs of potential customers becomes a very valuable thing. This competition will only intensify in the future, with more and more companies vying for a finite space. SEO will be an essential for everyone.
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Sam Qam is a SEO and website design consultant dealing with a wide variety of businesses from across the globe.
