Search Engine Optimisation
(SEO)...
If you want your website to feature in the 'natural' or 'organic' search engine listings' (those on the left) of the major search engines, your site must have a certain degree of optimisation. This is certainly the case the more competitive your business is.
The search engines automatically scan every website regularly and through many complex factors and processes, they determine the 'worth' of your site based on its content.
Many, many facets of your site come in to play here in determining its worth; the domain name, the design, content, visitor levels, popularity, variety of content, frequency of change, meta factors and how your site is rated by others to name just a few.
Too many website owners have become 100% reliant on pay per click advertising in isolation to generate business. Latest figures show that over £1.26 billion is spent on paid for search as opposed to a mere £147 million in comparison on natural search listings. This is only through ignorance and the fact that SEO is very much seen as a complex and uncomprehendable concept. Of course, it is a science in itself and a time consuming analytical, mid-long term process. The rules of SEO change regularly as dictated by the search engines themselves. However, on the surface SEO does have some comon sense principals.
From the point we begin to create a website, we will build it around the needs of search engines. Too many web designers will create a site with visual impact being the focal point, but what looks good and what Google interprets as good are two completely different things - a happy medium needs to be determined. We see countless websites on a daily basis, relatively new sites and those that have been established for a number of years with no means of optimisation in place, gaining no worthwhile search engine position and ultimately generating very little business, if any.
NB: We will always refer to Google due to the fact that over 86% of all worldwide searches are now conducted here.
Subject to your industry and the level of business you are trying to generate, you may also need to employ pay per click advertising.
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