SEO
What is SEO?
SEO, or Search Engine Optimisation is the process of affecting the visibility of a website or a web page in a search engine’s “natural” or unpaid (“organic”) search results. In general, the higher it is ranked on the search results page, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine’s users. The trick is how on earth do you get your website higher up on search engines?
What is a Search Engine?
A search engine is a website where you type in what you are looking for and get given a list of results to look through. The most dominant one, of course, is Google, with a market share of, wait for it, 91.42%! This is why the word Google is used as a verb much of the time: "Google it" rather than "Search for it".
Search Engines offer their services for free, although nothing is really free these days! Search Engines collect information all the time about what you are looking for and will use every opportunity they can to put adverts in front of you as you are searching. The reason for this is simple, every time you click on an advert, which is also known as a sponsored link, the company placing that advert will pay a fee to the search engine. The more times an advert is clicked, the more money the company pays to the search engine.
It is a very good way of advertising your business because you will be usually given the option to target your advertising to specific area of the country or to particular demographics of your audience, such as their age, gender or profession. It also a very good way to burn through a lot of cash very quickly if you are not careful!
Apart from Google, what other Search Engines are out there these days?
This is a very interesting question. Here is a list of another 9, I wonder how many you have heard of?
- Bing
- Yahoo
- Baidu
- Yandex
- DuckDuckGo
- Ask.com
- Ecosia
- Aol.com
- Internet Archive
The last one is a fantastic resource because it is a history of websites over time and how they have changed. However, what about this as another list of 3 other "Search Engines" that you may not immediately think of as actual Search Engines but they have a staggering amount of traffic to their websites?
- YouTube
- Amazon
So, if I want to get higher up on Google, I pay an SEO Company?
Yes, you can do. There are some reputable ones out there and they will be the ones who can give you case studies of their work ad invite you to contact their other customers. However, you may find that the vast majority of them may just take a lot of money from you, promise you dazzling results, overwhelm you all sorts of incredible statistics and yet, somehow, you have no more enquiries! There is another way, though!
What is this "other way"?
Google are quite upfront about some of the things they look for, in a website. It should be:
- Built properly, with little or no coding errors.
- Work equally well with mobile devices
- Fully accessible for disabled people (Google is blind, remember!)
- Hosted in the country the business is trading in
- Use a domain reflective of the country you are in (in the UK, for example, it would be .co.uk, .org.uk or .uk)
- Have a decent amount of original content on each page (for "decent", assume 500 words or more)
- Have new content on a regular basis (you need to give Google a reason to come back)
- Not have content taken from other websites (Google will have already seen it)
There are a lot of other things, hundreds, but this is a good starting point.
The good news is that, if you come to Access by Design for your website, we will ensure that you always tick boxes 1-4 and, if you work with our copywriters, we can tick boxes 6-8! Your domain of course, is your own choice and we can only advise you on that!
If you would like to find out more, why not get in touch?
Changing the World, One Website at a Time.