What is SEO?
SEO or Search Engine Optimisation is the process you go through to make your website as visible and relevant to your target audience as possible. If your website is well optimised through the process of SEO then it should be found on the search engines under relevant keyword phrases and if the optimisation has been done with your business objectives in mind then should be converting visitors on your website through those keywords.
Good technical architecture is the first step to optimising your site, without this then it will be hard for the search engines (and sometimes users) to travel around your website and understand the content. If you are building a new website at the same time as undertaking an SEO project, get some SEO consulting at the beginning of the project, if keyword research can be undertaken before the site has even been structured then this can be really helpful.To optimise your website well and get found under the right keyword phrases, you need to understand how search engines evaluate your site, even at a basic level. Every search engine wants to be the best, and to be the best you need to provide your visitors with the most relevant results on each and every search query they undertake. This way they keep coming back to you. Google currently has the largest market share in Australia, as of June 2009 they have over 90% of the market share with other search engines such as live/msn and yahoo each with around 3% each. This is why nearly all SEO’s will talk a lot about Google, you have to get the results on this search engine to make a difference to your levels of traffic.
Search Engines such as Google have got increasingly sophisticated over the years and now provide a range of results for the user. For example, if you type in the search query ‘Britney Spears’ to Google you get websites, images, videos and news results all on the front page of Google. If you type in ‘Cinemas Perth’ your results will include cinema times/ reviews and Google Map results. Google are providing the user with a range of results that the user is likely to find most useful.
It’s not all about rankings though, what you really want from your website is conversions. Through getting a detailed understanding of your business and undertaking extensive keyword research, the appropriate keywords can be targeted on your website to get relevant traffic flowing to your site and of course the more targeted your keywords are, the more likely your keywords are to convert into business.
Search Engine Optimisation can be described in many different ways, here are a few links with additional definitions:
Wikipedia- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_optimization
Google- http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35291
