2. If you are a webmaster then you might have heard this
bantered around quite often and you might have some
idea of what it is. If you are not actively involved in your
website or have had little exposure to the Internet then
you probably have very little understanding of what SEO
actually is. Your current knowledge level is not really an
issue as SEO is something that very few people have
chosen to learn and up skill themselves in. While it is not
common knowledge and you are willing to learn there is
a competitive edge that you can exploit. It means with
some small modifications to your website that you can
achieve higher results in search engines than your lesser
SEO savvy competitors.
3. In this article I explain what SEO is and I take you
through some of the most important Search Engine
Optimisation techniques to help improve your website
search engine rankings.
5. SEO is search engine optimisation. Essentially Search
Engine Optimisation is the art of creating or modifying a
website to make it search engine friendly. Search
engines are the gateway to gaining huge amounts of
website traffic. Imagine if you sold Blue Widgets, then
placing as number 1 in a search for "Blue Widgets"
would gain you far more traffic than placing number 100
- This should be obvious. To gain rankings and places in
the search results your website needs to be better
search optimised than the websites that are currently
showing above yours in the search results. The more
search engine friendly that your website is, then the
greater the chance that the search engines will rank
6. you more highly. By using certain SEO techniques you
will increase your website in the rankings and hence
increase your website traffic. This is why SEO is probably
the most important thing about having a website - after
all, you can have a very good website but what is the
point if no one visits it and buys your product?
8. SEO can be performed site wide but the way we do this
is by using the same SEO techniques on each page one at
a time. So although it is common to say a website is
search engine optimised in fact we mean that each page
of the website is search optimised. Okay, so it should be
clear now that SEO for your website is vital for your
websites success online. Now, the question is how do we
start optimising a website? As there are so many SEO
techniques that we could implement in this article I take
you through the three that are generally considered the
most important by SEO experts.
10. This step sets the scene for the web page we are about
to optimise. We need to do some research using
keyword tools, like Google Adwords and Overture
Inventory keyword tools. Using these two tools we can
input our main term used on the current page we are
trying to optimise. We should record the results from
these and then order by search volume. We then weed
out any irrelevant terms and are left with a list of highly
searched and highly relevant terms to this page.
12. It is common opinion among SEO professionals that the
Title of a webpage is THE single most important SEO
aspect of a webpage. The title of the webpage is the first
thing a search engine views and tries to interpret. It is
vital to ensure that the title is unique across your whole
website and that it is highly related and relevant to the
content of the webpage. We like to use between 4-10
words in the title tag and we always use the leftward
rule. Leftward rule is where the most important words
are closer to the left. In this case, the most highly
searched on terms we identified in SEO technique 1.
14. Often websites reproduce information that is copied
from other websites. This is a very bad thing to do and
search engines are so smart now that they check to
duplicated content both within the same website and
across all websites pages within their index. It is very
important to ensure your website has unique content
across the whole Internet. You can write unique articles
or howto's or you can find someone who will write
unique content for you. If you currently find that a lot of
your pages are listed in the supplemental index on
Google then making sure the titles, descriptions, meta
keywords and all of your on page content is unique is
how you would pull them out of the supplemental
16. This brings us to the end of the Introduction to Search
Engine Optimisation. Having covered a few of the basics
of SEO you should be well on track to having a few of
your web pages optimised.
