Moodey IT

There is no doubt that this is one of most asked questions.  There is no doubt too that as a company in a niche market you want your website to rank high in the search engine results, if not at number 1 position.  How is this achieved and can you do it your self?

There are many ways to draw traffic to your website and one of the best ways is to be found on the internet in places like Google, yahoo or MSN.  Search engine optimisation is about optimising your website to appear in the organic or non-sponsored (left-hand side) list of links in the search.

Search engine optimisation requires time and effort and is measurable.

To start with your web page must contain relevant content that relates to the products or services that you are offering.  Search engines are not human and rely on the text of the page to inform them what the information is being offered from that web page.   You need to ensure that your keywords, (phrases used to search for your website) are repeated throughout the text.  This should not be done too often,  as stuffing a web page with the same keywords will actually make the search engine rank it lower.  You should also use the keyword in the title tag.  Using the keyword naturally throughout the page is a good policy.

Using back links, or incoming links to your website is essential.  This is one of the most beneficial ways to increase your ranking.  Incoming links should be from relevant sources, in other words sources related to your own industry.  The back link text should be related to your keywords.  There are many ways to find places for your back links such as blogs, forums, article and directories.  Another method is to contact a webmaster of another site and request a link, or offer to provide content.  In many ways it is like getting a vote, the more links there are the more popular the website.

Another good way to help increase ranking is to add more content to your website.  The reason for this is that the website will get spidered more often by search engines.  With good internal linking structures your website will be seen to be offering new fresh content, and this will grab the attention of the search engine bots.

Search engine optimisation takes time to increase your ranking in the search engines because it takes extra effort to ensure that your website is marketed properly.  To get to the first page in a search engine requires many different internet marketing techniques, time and effort!

(Source: moodeyit.com)

Keywords are the search terms that people put into a search engine to do a search.  A search term can be a single word term or a phrase.

A ‘bot’ will index your web pages and calculate the most relevant keywords associated with your web page, and when a person searches using those keywords, the results are shown.  We call the results Search Engine Result Pages or SERPs.

(Source: moodeyit.com)

The term ‘Search Engine’ refers to a search index, a large database containing information about individual web sites. The large search index companies have thousands of computers that use software to search the internet and index them into their databases.

This software is often referred to as ‘spiders’ or ‘bots’. These ‘bots’ grab some or all the information from web pages and use complex algorithms to index the pages into their databases.

Examples of search engines include: Google, Yahoo.com, Bing, MSN.

(Source: moodeyit.com)

Blogging is still an excellent way to build link popularity for your website, or for your customers websites.  However this method to create back links to your website  is getting more and more difficult.

The difficulty here is that most blogging software now includes code which prevents some search engine bots from following the link. Some search engines will not count this link as a relevant link to your website, in fact some will completely ignore the link altogether. However some search engines will count the link, and some will even index the link.

There are many search engines but only a handful is used by the majority of people. Consideration needs to be taken for your target market and what search engine your potential customer is likely to use.  Google is currently the most widely used.  Understanding how each of the search engine algorithms work will determine the best method to use when it comes to adding links back to your website.

When adding a comment to a blog to create a back link that has the nofollow tag could be  a waste of time.  This assuming of course that the only reason for leaving this comment is to create a back link to your own website.  This makes for creating back links to your website using blogs difficult.

TIP: Look for the ‘nofollow’ tag in the code if you are trying to increase your Google Page Rank!

(Source: moodeyit.com)

Keywords or keyphrases are those search terms put into a search engine like Google or Ask by your potential customers.  Wikipedia describes keywords as:- Keywords are the words that are used to reveal the internal structure of an author’s reasoning.

We often get asked the questions ‘Do I need keywords for my website?’ or ‘How many keywords should we have?’ or ‘What keywords should we have?’  Understanding the role and importance of keywords or keyphrases is paramount to the marketing success of your website.

Keywords tell search engines what the content of your website is about. Remember that search engines are computers, and computers only understand what we tell them.  We tell search engines what our web page is about by using keywords.

Understanding your business and how it relates to your customers helps you to understand what your keywords should be.  Thekeywords chosen need to be those used by your customers and those search terms most used by your potential customers.

Imagine you open a book shop.  This bookshop will be stocked with all the latest books. However when chosing the location of this shop you chose to open out of town on a very quiet road.  Unfortunately your advertising costs are going to be higher than if you were in the town, just to get people to your shop.  This is similar to chosing keywords. Chosing keywords that your potential customers do not use compared to using keywords that people do use.  The more people that use a keyword that you have chosen the more chance they have of visiting your website.

(Source: moodeyit.com)