SEO / Search Engine Optimisation / Coming First on Google / Search on the Internet

The BASICS

Call it what you may SEO / Google Search / Search Engine Rank / being found on the internet, Search Engine Optimisation is an important aspect to your business and website or web design working for your business. Whether you are marketing Belfast, Northern Ireland, Ireland, the UK or on a World Wide Scale, SEO internet marketing plays a very important role in the success of your website. This isn’t only for people selling their products on the internet; Search Engine Optimisation is effective for businesses that are selling a service.

Can anybody get you to number 1 in Google next week? NO (unless of course you pay, well then that’s not organic, in fact if that’s the case you could be number one nearly immediately if you want to pay for it). Google and the other search engines (Yahoo, BING etc) make it fair for everybody in the organic listing or natural listing in the search engines, so the more work you put in the more chance you have. As some businesses and sectors are different, various search engine marketing would be needed for your specific sector.

What is Search Engine Optimisation? I found this answer in a blog and thought it made perfect sense for somebody who doesn’t understand all the ‘techy’ talk that the SEO people throw at you.

 “Imagine a librarian enters a huge, empty library filled with empty (but labelled) shelves and sees, on the floor, a huge pile of books which they have to place on the shelves. Now they could just put the books on the shelves in a random order and be done. But then none of the library visitors would be able to find the kinds of books they were looking for. So instead, the librarian looks at each book for clues as to which part of the library they should shelve the book.
The book can give the librarian all sorts of clues as to where it needs to be shelved in the library. The picture on the cover; the title of the book; the recommendations on the back of the book; who the recommendations are by; the index of the book; the contents of the book; the introduction of the book; whether the books pages are filled with text or are mostly illustrations etc.

A very good bookmaker will know EXACTLY how to produce a book so as to give the librarian the best possible chance of placing the book on the most relevant library shelf where the maximum number of library visitors looking for it will find it.
That’s what SEO is.”

Courtesy of http://www.davidnaylor.co.uk/why-the-internet-needs-seo.html

There are some basics that should be adhered too and considered.

Keyword Research
Effective use of meta data (keywords, title, description etc)
Proper use of heading tags
Image optimisation
XML Sitemaps
Search Engine Friendly URL’s

Combining all of these methods in your strategy will hopefully help you rank well in the search engines and bring more and more visitors to your site via the search engines. To make your website design more effective with search engine rankings and beat your competition, be sure to include Search Engine Optimisation in your online marketing strategy to some degree.