Search Engine Optimisation for Beginners

Search engine optimisation, or SEO, is one of those phrases which, if you are in business, you will hear mentioned increasingly often. It's a phrase which is describes a skill and practice which more people involved in sales and marketing need to understand if they are to succeed in the hyper-competitive world. 

Search engine optimisation is the very necessary activity which is going to help people looking for what you supply find your business more easily when they search on the internet through search engines like Google and Bing.

But, if you are running a small business and have little time to learn about search engine optimisation in detail, it's useful to know some basics so that you can, at least, have a sensible conversation with someone in your marketing team, or with someone you hire to carry out your internet marketing.

Firstly, search engine optimisation sounds complicated, but the basics of it are quite simple. The first thing you have to get right is knowing which words or phrases your ideal buyers or visitors will use to find you. These are known as keywords or key phrases. Any seo company that you hire will start asking you to do this as part of your internet marketing plans.

So, if you supply people with fishing tackle in your local town and you want to attract more customers for your products, you might want to use the following keywords in the text you use on your website's homepage: 'fishing tackle Oxford'.

The next thing you need to know about search engine optimisation is that search engines look through websites (called crawling) for text to understand whether your website is relevant to what people are searching for. But, you have to balance the keywords you use to show your relevance to search engines with writing good content which is easily understood by humans. It's no good stuffing your web pages with keywords which don't make sense to people.

In addition to this, it's important not to put keywords onto your web pages which can be seen by search engines but not by humans. So, you might write some keywords in white on your web page which is a white page. Search engines know about this trick and it will get you penalised by them, which means your website could be so far down the search results page that you might as well not exist. This practice is one of a number of tactics which would be carried out by a spurious seo company and it is known as 'black hat SEO'. Don't do it. Insist on honest 'white hat SEO' practices.

'White hat SEO' is being honest with your customers and the search engines. Write good content which is relevant to your customers and don't try any 'black hat seo' internet marketing tricks.

Another SEO lesson to learn is that search engines don't look for relevant websites for the keywords. Search engines look for relevant web pages. So, when you are planning your website, you need to select keywords which are relevant for each of your web pages. For your seo plan, think at the page level and this will help your enormously to get your web pages to a higher level in the 'organic search results' (the search results which are below and to the left of the 'cost per click' advertisements.

It's also important to know that for good SEO that search engines, as you can probably guess by now, look for text on web pages. They don't see images. Images are good for people using a website, but you need to make sure that images are 'described' in the code which makes up each of your web pages. These descriptions in the code are known as 'tags'. The tag for an image in a web page is called the 'ALT' tag. Use relevant keywords in your 'ALT' tags so that the search engines understand the relevance of the image to your web pages.

Finally, probably the most important search engine optimisation lesson for beginners to know is another meta tag on each web page which is the 'TITLE' tag. Each of your web pages should have a unique description relevant to the web page. This is one of the first items that search engines look for. Without this description your chances of getting your website presented in the organic search results is greatly diminished.

In conclusion, SEO is a vital part of internet marketing. Proper keyword research is the basis of successful search engine optimisation. If you get this right and do some basics right, such as tagging each web page correctly, you are going to get better results. There is a lot more to SEO to get right too (which I will cover in posts to follow) but, if you understand some of principles behind it you will be in a better position to do some of the work yourself or to speak sensibly with a SEO specialist.