This article is intended to explain what SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is to those who have no experience of it or are just starting to get into it. Its the start of a long journey as it is the only way of naturally marketing a website without having to pay for campaigns or advertising. Mastering the art of this will enable you to attract huge amounts of visitors by taking advantage of the way Google and other large search engines such as Bing and Yahoo! use their algorithms to rank sites in the SERP (Search Engine Ranking Process).
The SERP (this is an important term in SEO so remember it) determines what number position a website will come up for on a search results page for specific keywords. Having your website come up in position #1 for a keyword related to the business or organisation is all what SEO is about. It’s not that simple though; Google has the most sophisticated and complicated algorithms using advanced mathematical calculations and using many other ranking factors to determine where a site should appear in a search and with the billions of sites out there they need to make sure it’s perfected in every way possible.
Google is the world’s portal for information. It’s how people find anything and everything on the web unless you directly know about it. Larry Page who is the co-founder of Google came up with the amazing idea of PageRank. PageRank was once a simple calculation to determine how popular a site is:
PR(A) = (1-d) + d(PR(t1)/C(t1) + … + PR(tn)/C(tn))
Basically, a link from another website pointing to yours would count as a vote for that website, having many incoming links to your website would show that it is popular and would positively increase your search engine ranking. PR is a score out of 10 but it is no longer determined in such a simple manner. There are now thousands of factors that we aren’t told about that affects the SERP. For example, having incoming links from relevant sites is a plus compared to links coming in from spam sites which would give a negative impact on rankings.
When speaking about SEO, a lot of webmasters mention the phrase “content is king”, and that’s because it’s true. The quality of content and information provided on a website is not only what improves PR, but it’s what drives people to your website in the first place. If you have good content that people find interesting, you’ll notice those visitors come back to check for updates, so have a frequently updated website will drive even more traffic to you and this is what started blogging in the early days of the internet.
Trust is another factor, these algorithms can even find out how trusted a website is. Spam is a massive problem on the internet so Google tackles it quite efficiently, having your domain registered for a long time and using certificates from well-known organisations such as VeriSign signify that a trust is approved from a high authority and don’t expect PageRanks to update very frequently; the Google Toolbar has a PR calculator for monitoring the PR of web pages but is not always accurate. The official PageRank updates are only rolled out a few time every year. Recently content farms were targeted by the ‘Panda’ PR update meaning websites that copy content from other websites or don’t have completely original content will see a decrease in rankings meaning less traffic from Google.
These are only the basic fundamentals of search engine optimisation. There is a lot to learn and climbing to the top of SERP results is a long process of building popularity and trust. A good way to start building links is to submit to relevant directories and become active in forums and blogging. It’s a never-ending process but for the visibility of your site on the web the results can be outstanding. Without having to pay a thing and with the recession still going on lately more and more online businesses turn to SEO to build their brand and business. Social media marketing can also have a large impact, though it’s a different topic in some ways it’s a part of traffic optimisation too. Stick to these basic rules and set some goals (realistic ones with realistic time frames, we’re talking months and even years) and you’ll eventually see some really good results.
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