The Importance of SEO
How do you make your website a success? SEO - Search Engine Optimisation, is the process by which you tweak critical factors concerning your site (both on-page and off-page factors) to try to make it rank well in the search engines for key words or phrases that people search for. if you rank well, more people see your site in the listing and hence you gain more traffic (i.e. site visitors).
SEO is a risky business and can fall into three categories; Black Hat, Grey Hat and White Hat techniques. The first two should be avoided as they involve practices which could see your site banned from the search engines. White hat SEO is a different matter and is a legitimate way to try and improve your site’s positioning in the likes of Google, Yahoo and MSN. As Google accounts for over 50% of all searches, it is worth focusing on this search engine (SE) for optimisation. Note that the different SE’s require slightly different optimisation techniques as their algorithms (which stipulate the rules for how sites rank for various keywords) are different from each other and evolve over time. Nevertheless, if you focus your SEO techniques on Google, which has arguably the most successful algorithm, then you stand a great chance of doing well in the other SE’s as well.
So what is good SEO practice? There are two types of optimisations efforts; on-page and off-page. On-page optimisation concerns tweaking your content, positioning of page elements and proper use of HTML tags/attributes. There is a wealth of information about this subject… just go to Google and type “white hat on-page SEO”. You need to get this form of content optimisation right! The second area you need to deal with is Off-page optimisation. This revolves around getting your site noticed online, via in-bound links, i.e. other sites linking to your site. There are many techniques to acquire in-bound links and this is where most of the spade-work of SEO is performed. It is not an easy task to do and will require a lot of effort and time. I think a good starting point is to make sure you have around 4000-8000 good quality in-bound links, and keep building it from there. There are ways to check the quality and number of these links, but that is for another post. As with on-page techniques, look up Google to find out the best ways to acquire in-bound links, or search this blog to find some tips.