Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) Explained

Search engine optimisation is about engineering your website in such a way that it will appear higher in the search engine rankings. 42% to 86% of website's are found through search engines, such as Google, Yahoo and Lycos SEO is extremely important and has numerous benefits:

Your website will be found
Your website will be more usable
Search engines are becoming evermore accurate in their searches
Search Engines are becoming ever more popular
64% of Internet users use search engines as their primary web navigation tool
Google alone now have over 4 billion web page's indexed

Website's optimised for search engines are also optimised for users. Some of the most basic aspects of search engine optimisation are:

Finding words and phrases that Internet users are looking for
Placing these important words and phrases in prominent places on each page
Writing efficient code that search engines can easily sift through
Providing great content that other website's will want to link to
These will all help your website increase its usability too

Search Engine Strategies

Search Engine Strategies should aim to encompass three broad areas:

Content research and creation
Structuring content within the site
Building inbound links

The process of SEO is not easy to tackle, largely because so many pieces of a site factor into the final results as briefly listed below:

Well written, strategic and relevant content
Descriptive Internal linking structure
Use of correct technologies, XHTML, CSS.
Correct page structure & appropriately employed tags <h1>, <h2>, <b>
Keep the code clean & free from in page CSS & JS
Quality In-bound non reciprocal links (The higher ranked the referring site the better)
Title and header elements with description & keywords specific to that page and the overall keyword strategy.
XML Sitemaps submitted appropriately.
Robot.txt (mainly to exclude and point SE's to xml sitemap)

The Difference between SEM & SEO

Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

SEM relates to the purchase of AdWords or other online marketing media like banner ads. Search engine marketing is very controllable. We decide what we want to spend, which words or phrases we want to purchase, and exactly which page we want our ad to link to.

Bottom line however is that we are purchasing the privilege of a higher ranking, therefore paid links are not always as trustworthy as organic links & users are becoming aware of this as organic links are clicked on seven times more frequently than sponsored ads.

Organic search results are free carry a sense of trust and authority over their bought link cousins, precisely because they can't be bought. The value of organic search results make the extra work needed to optimise our pages well worth the effort.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

SEO relates to the examination of a website to find any technical barriers that might be preventing a search engine from accessing a website's content, and then identifying the most relevant site content and improving significant elements (primarily the page's browser title but elements of content) in order to help the search engine index the content most effectively.

Relevance is the most important factor to a good search engine placement and search engines' key objective is to be able to do direct searches to the most relevant result.

One of the challenges of search engine optimisation is that search engines are continually evolving in how they determine relevance. This means that any attempts to "trick" a search engine into thinking a page is relevant, when it is not, will ultimately fail.

SEO is about making your website in such a way that it will appear higher in the search rankings. A website that's optimised for search engines can reap huge benefits on to your website and your business.

42% to 86% of website's are found through search engines
There are 300 million searches carried out per day, every day

HTML pages must be easy for search engines to follow

Search engines scour the Internet looking for web pages to index, following links from one web page to the next. To ensure a search engine ranking, all pages on your website must be accessible to search engines. Some search engines have problems with:

Links accessible solely through frames, image maps, or JavaScript
Very long pages
Very short pages
Flash pages
Extensive in page JavaScript (JavaScript should be placed in an external document)
Dynamic URL's

If any of these describe pages on your website then your web pages will probably not achieve a high search engine ranking.

We do offer a full SEO report which we provide to all our clients.

For more information on Firecurl's solutions contact us.