What is SEO? Web Words That Work
By Carl Chambers, Chambers Copy & Content
Simply put, SEO – Search Engine Optimisation – is a way of making web pages rank more prominently in search engine results. The ultimate goal of SEO is to make a web page appear at the very top of page one in search engine natural listings.
Three Quick Steps to SEO Success
- Ensure that page copy is useful, relevant, engaging and original;
- Optimise content – apply SEO to your web page copy (use keywords, key phrases, link between pages etc.);
- Encourage inbound links (link building) – try to get other websites to link to your desired web page.
Any of these will make your website more noticeable to search engine web crawlers, but aim for all three. That said, Point 1 is by far the most important because when it comes to search engines – Content is King. Unique and compelling copy keeps eyeballs on your site, encourages return visits, and gets readers to promote your site by forwarding links to friends, posting links in forums, or linking to the site directly (from their own website/blog) or via social networks (e.g. Digg, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn).
So, if you have well-written, relevant content (1) that is optimised (2), the link building (3) should eventually start to take care of itself as more and more people start to recommend your site.
For a more detailed look at how to optimise content, check out SEO Tips to Up Your Page Ranking. But before doing so, if you’re a little baffled by SEO and search engine jargon, here’s a quick explanation of some common terms.
Good and Bad SEO
As mentioned earlier, fully-optimised, unique and compelling content is key to climbing up those search engine rankings. But what do terms like ‘fully-optimised’, ‘good SEO’ and ‘bad SEO’ mean?
If a web crawler comes across a page that’s selling, say, home insurance, and the page has bad SEO, the robot may attribute it with low relevance for search terms to do with home insurance. The net result (excuse the pun) is that this web page will appear way down in search engine rankings for people looking for ‘home insurance’, and is therefore less likely to be clicked on – the kiss of death for any web business.
But a page with good SEO will grab a search engine’s attention and stand a much better chance of appearing higher up the natural listings. This is why it’s so desirable to have fully optimised content – it can place your website on Page 1 of a search engine for free.
Sponsored Links and Natural Listings
Go to Google* and run a search on ‘home insurance’. Directly below the search box you’ll see a yellow area containing two or three home insurer links. In the right hand margin of the page, you’ll see another list of home insurer links. These two areas are for sponsored links, where companies pay Google to appear prominently for a given search term.
Directly below the yellow box is a large white area containing yet more home insurance links – these are the natural listings (sometimes called Organic Listings). And why are natural listings so important? Well it’s simply because natural listings are free, and a website gets there by proving its relevance to whatever search term was entered to arrive at that page.
*There are, of course, other search engines – Ask, Bing, Yahoo! etc – but, for good or bad, Google is the current undisputed king of search, handling as much as 90% of all UK searches.
Search Term
This simply refers to the word or words you type into a search engine’s search box. For example, if you’re looking for a cheap mortgage, logical search terms to enter to get the results you want would be ‘mortgages’, ‘cheap mortgages’ or ‘home loans’.
Web Crawlers
Web crawlers (sometimes called spiders, robots or just ‘bots’) are what make search engines work. Basically, they are software programs that continually scour the web to eke out details on just about every web page out there. After assessing a page, the robots categorise it, and this is how, after you type ‘freelance copywriter’ into a search engine, sites like mine appear in the results.
Next: SEO Tips to Up Your Page Ranking - Part 1
Need fully optimised, unique and compelling content for your website? Contact Chambers Copy and Content to get a quote.