What is Search Engine Optimisation?
...and does it matter?
I'll answer the second question first. Yes, it matters. A lot. Search Engine Optimisation offers free, targetted traffic for your site. It involves putting effort in up front that pays off in the long run.
Let's begin by defining what "SEO" means. In a nutshell, it's about making sure your site appears as high up in the search engine rankings as possible*. In other words, if you sell organic garden products, you want to appear high up the Google (or Yahoo or whatever) listings when your potential customer types "Organic Garden Products" into their search engine.
There are two ways of going about this. The first is to use the Google Adwords system. The advantage of Adwords is that you get almost instant results. Changes made to your adverts appear almost straight away and you can very quickly test the effect of various changes and, in that way, optimise the ad so that it performs better. However, this flexibility costs money. It can certainly be profitable, if done properly (and, indeed, is one of our recommended marketing methods for most online businesses) but is most effective when it's backed up by free traffic.
This is where SEO comes in. By getting this right, your website will rise in the rankings at no cost to you at all. It takes MUCH longer to achieve a high position in the non-sponsored (organic) part of the search results but, once done, it's entirely free. If a customer sees you listed in both the organic results and the sponsored listings, the two reinforce each other and greatly increase your traffic.
So, the bad news is that the effects of optimising your site takes time to be reflected in your listing. The good news (apart from the fact that you get free traffic) is that a properly optimised site will reduce the cost of your Adwords campaign whilst simultaneously making it more effective.
SEO revolves around the process of making your site as visible to Google** as possible. It is NOT about "tricking" Google into giving your site an artificially high ranking, not least because Google doesn't release detailed information about how it goes about ranking sites.
The crucial thing to remember is that Google (and all other search engines) want to present the most relevant entries to searches that they possibly can. This relevance is one reason for Google's success: people moved away from Yahoo (etc) because the quality of results in Google was better.
Given this, it becomes clear that your job is do the following:
- Create a site that contains useful, relevant content
- Organise the content so that each page is focused on a specific topic
- Optimise the site so that it is easily accessible to Google and the other search engines
- Sit back and wait for the free traffic!
*If any company EVER says they can guarantee top position in the natural listings they are lying. Or omnipotent. Which do you think is more likely?
**Most of what I'm saying applies just as much to other search engines but, to save space and because Google is by far the biggest and most important search engine, I'm going to just talk about Google here.
