Slowly but surely businesses of all sizes are starting to realise that just by building a website they will not be successful online. There is no point in spending money on building a corporate website if no one can find it or access it successfully.
This is where SEO or Search Engine Marketing (SEM) comes into play.
What is SEO?
SEO is the active optimisation of on and off page elements of a website to drive more traffic to the site via natural search results.
What is SEM then?
The difference between SEO and SEM is that SEM is interested in traffic to a site via all forms of search channels; this can be paid (PPC) and Social Media Marketing (SMM).
This article will concentrate on SEO for now, more to follow on the other channels at a later date.
How do search engines work?
Search engines such as Google send out little crawlers call spiders, which mimic human users and travel through a website as well as from one website to another. While they are going through sites they store each page of a site in the search engine’s database.
When a user does a search using a keyword or phrase the search engine’s algorithm then cross references its database with the keyword. It shortlists websites and carries out an algorithm check to see which site should rank where.
The role of SEO
The purpose of an SEO campaign is to initially ensure search engines can find the site, secondly to make sure search engine spiders can crawl the entire site and then most importantly ensure that the site ranks highly in the algorithm.
SEO Techniques
SEO can be broken down into 3 main sections:
- On-Page: Meta Data, content and headings
- Technical: Sitemaps, code, structure and layout
- Off-page: Link Building, content marketing and social media marketing
The next few articles will go into each of these SEO techniques in more details, so watch this space!
