What is SEO?
What is SEO?
“Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” or un-paid (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results as opposed to search engine marketing (SEM) which deals with paid inclusion.” – Wikipedia, February 2010.
There are a number of factors that will determine a website’s success in the search results:
On Page Factors
It’s vitally important that your website is properly structured with search engines in mind. When a search engine ‘bot’ or ‘spider’ crawls your site, it doesn’t see what a human sees. Certain page elements such as images and javascript if used incorrectly can mean that parts of your site won’t be included a search engine’s index. Internal links should be properly formatted and the page structure should be uncomplicated. All of this is often referred to as ‘on page’ optimisation.
Off Page Factors / Link Building
All search engines work differently, but the major ones all share one similarity – when it comes to assigning importance to a website, they all place a heavy emphasis on external links pointing at that site.
Let’s take the example of Google, as it’s the most commonly used search engine. Google assesses every web page it finds and assigns it a score, based on how important it judges that page to be. It calls this score Pagerank. There are hundreds of criteria that Google uses to arrive at a page’s pagerank score, but the main one is the number and quality of inbound links to that page. Aquiring these links is often referred to as link building or ‘off page’ optimisation.
Content
Above all a site should have compelling, engaging content, which will appeal to your target audience. It’s of little benefit to have a website which ranks number 1 for your chosen keyword terms, only for visitors to land on your page only to leave again within a few seconds.
Maximise provides both on page and off page optimisation, and can also help with creating and adjusting content.
Contact us to see what we can do for your website.