Search engine success #1: an introduction
Search engine success requires a consistent investment of time, effort and dedication. Here's a basic introduction…
Typically around 80% of website visitors come from search engines, so it’s vital to ensure that your site ranks well if you want lots of visitors to your website.
The ‘holy grail’, of course, is guiding qualified visitors to your website – a captive audience that are interested in what you’re offering. You not only sell what your customers want, but you also sell it while they’re actively looking for it… RESULT!
There are no shortcuts
It would be lovely if these high rankings happened automatically, but unfortunately the reality is very different – there are no guarantees. Search engine success comes from careful planning, hard work and often a consistent investment of time, skill, dedication and money.
Whether you’re planning to do your own SEO (search engine optimisation) or are hiring in the professionals, it pays to understand the basics to get the most value out of your efforts and money.
The tip of the iceberg
So how can you increase your search engine ranking? The subject is vast (we’ll only scratch the surface here), so what follows is a simple introduction to how search engines work, and how to best begin to increase your chances of luring lots of qualified visitors to your website.
What’s a search engine?
Search engines exist to help you find what you’re looking for on the Web. Although there are hundreds of search engines, in reality only a small few are of significant importance – Google, Yahoo and MSN are the key players.
How do search engines work?
Search engines use special software (called ‘robots‘ or ‘spiders‘) to constantly ‘crawl’ around the web. The ‘spider’ visits web pages, randomly following the links it finds to other web pages, and ‘indexing’ the text content of the sites it finds in the search engine’s database.
Then, when people such as you or I use a search engine (such as Google) to find what we’re looking for, we enter a ‘keyword phrase‘ – such as “web designer Hull“. The search engine then goes and finds the websites in its database whose pages contain that phrase, or those words. The results are then returned to you, all in a matter of milliseconds, displayed 10 web pages at a time.
How do search engines rank websites in any particular order?
Search engines simply want to provide good quality, relevant results to their users. It’s that simple. However, with billions of pages in its database, a search engine has to make some tough decisions about which are the best results to return for any given search, and in what order.
So, search engines use a highly secret mathematical formula (seriously!), based on a good deal of rather complex factors, to decide which sites should appear in the results, and in which particular order.
Sadly, most people rarely look beyond the first two pages of results, so its vital to ensure that your site ranks highly for the very ‘keyword phrases‘ that your potential customers might be using.
Ah, I see! So what can I do?
People are right now searching the web, using keywords and phrases relevant to your business. So how can you go about influencing the search engines to return pages from your website in the results?
Here’s an overview of how search engines rank websites, and thus what you can do to maxmise your chances of gaining masses of qualified search engine traffic.
Two main factors
There are 2 broad factors governing how search engines rank a website: on-page and off-page factors.
In part 2 of our ‘Search Engine Success‘ series we examine the importance of ‘on page factors‘ – the things you can do on your own website to increase your chance of high rankings.
And in the 3rd and final part of the series we examine the huge importance of ‘off page factors‘ – gaining links from other websites to yours.
What next?
- Read part 2 of our ‘Search Engine Success’ series of articles
- See all our resources and articles
- Contact us today to discuss your search engine strategy
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