Search Engine Optimisation
This is the process of preparing a website to be found by Google and other search engines. Search Engines are an important source of visitors to any website so it's important that a business' website is optimized for search engines. Depending on the nature of your business and both its online and offline marketing strategy, Search Engine Optimization varies in importance. To understand website SEO, you need to understand Google:
Indexing
Google visits a website and tries to decide how to index the pages on the site - much like a librarian trying to decide whether to place a book in the "Business Science" or "Business Finance" section. A librarian will look at the title of the book, then the index and chapter headings, and then maybe at some of the text in the book. Google goes one better by reading the entire text, and cross-referencing it with the rest of the book. In this way, Google indexes each page of a website under certain keywords. The page that you are reading is probably going to be indexed under the keywords "Google", "Search Engine Optimisation", "indexing" and so on. As you can see, Google can place a web page in many sections of its library.
Ranking
Once Google has indexed all of the pages on the internet, it needs to rank those pages - it needs to decide which one would best suit someone looking for information on that keyword. If someone was looking for information on "How does Google index web pages" they may well get this page in the list of results. It won't be in the top 10, because there are thousands of web pages exclusively dedicated to the subject, and they are trying a whole lot harder to be the ones at the top of that particular list.
The people that use Google
There are millions of people (actually more like 1.3 billion) on Google looking for things by means of keywords or key phrases. If they are looking to buy shoes they'll ask for "shoes" or, more specifically "smart black shoes" or "hiking boots". These are called "search queries". Whatever your industry or business sector, there are people on Google showing their interest by typing in keywords related to it. Google is the most common way for people to search on the web. A number of people (you may be one of them...) even type in "www.cocacola.com" to Google, when they are looking for the Coca Cola website, and click on the first search result.
Putting SEO into Perspective
That some internet users type "www.cocacola.com" into Google highlights the most important factor when considering SEO:
SEO IS NOT AN END IN ITSELF
SEO needs to be seen in terms of a business' overall online and offline marketing strategy. It also needs to be considered in relation to other more effective and more targeted traffic generation tools. SEO is important, but it needs to help achieve the aims of the website, not be an end in itself.
50% of traffic to the average website comes from visitors looking for the company name directly rather than doing sector-related search queries. Mostly, people have a good idea of what they are looking for, and they are coming to the internet because they have already been made aware of the product or business through a mainstream marketing or networking channel.
Keywords are competitive. Some keywords will take years to compete for. If you were to try to get into the top 10 on Google for the keyword "shoes", it would take you 2 years and a large monthly budget. You would do better to pour that time and money into making your after-sales service program better or increasing your advertising budget.
What is good for Google is good for your customers
Luckily, what is good for your customers visiting your website is good for optimizing your website for Google. What this means is that if you are offering good, well written content, your customers will find it valuable and Google will index it correctly and rank it well.
At Black Square we value and implement search engine marketing on our websites - but we understand where it belongs, and we try to quantify how useful it will be on a website by website basis.
