Google took the online world by storm on 2 fronts. First, Google built a search engine that simply did it ‘better’ than other search engines – returning relevant results in a timely, easy to use manner. Second, Google introduced an advertising solution called Adwords where paid advertisements appear near natural or organic search results. Google continues to expand and grow other areas of service delivery however these two Google services remain the most powerful of them all. Companies wishing to attract new customers need to appear on search result pages – and preferably at the top of page 1 for highly competitive search phrases. Organic and paid search services will remain a valuable component of marketing strategies going into the future.
In this article we talk about search engine optimisation (SEO), the process of improving your organic search engine rankings in the search engines and attracting more organic clicks.
Organic search results occupy a very large space on search result pages. Paid ads usually appear adjacent organic results and attract fewer clicks.
Steps involved in improving the rank of a website in the search engines
The process of search engine optimisation is best started prior to website design, affects development and should ideally be continued on a monthly basis after the site goes live. There are various steps and types of exercises that are required, they are :
– search phrase research : identify your key products and services and choose highly competitive search phrases based on search phrase popularity statistics. Wordtracker is a well recognised source of search phrase popularity statistics
– information hierarchy : it is important that your sites content be structured and designed in a way that groups related information in themes. The themes should closely relate to your target search phrases
– W3C web standards : web standards based development encourages the separation of content from style when building a webpage. Search engines are likely to favour and ‘understand’ webpages that are content rich rather than a mix of both style and content