Nine out of ten Internet users find what they are looking for on the internet through search engines such as Google. Many people do not look beyond the first page of results displayed by the search engine – each page of Google will typically show ten websites. Almost no users venture beyond the third page or the first 30 website results displayed. With this in mind it is easy to see why Search Engine Optimisation is so important for your website to rank high in these results.
Having a website is one thing, but creating a website that people surfing the Internet are able to find is quite something else. This is where professional website design and development come to the fore.
The Search Engine results can be broadly divided into two categories: “Organic” or ”Natural” listings and adverts which are usually displayed on a “Pay Per Click” (PPC) basis on a different colour background at the top of each page of search results or down the right sidebar of the search screen.
Users of the Internet are not stupid. It is common knowledge that a company that needs to pay to have its website pushed to the front of the list of results almost certainly has an inferior website – after all, with a good website that is naturally ranked high by the search engines there is no need to pay!
Roughly 80% of clicks at Google are as the result of people ignoring the sponsored paid search engine results and instead looking for the websites that rank high organically or naturally. These are the websites that have been built well, that contain the best content and which are most likely to meet the needs of the person conducting the Internet search – this is the very reason that search engines give them a high rank and push them to the front of the list of search results.
Having your website rank high is not black magic – it is just a matter of optimising your website to be search engine friendly. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the process of engineering your website so it can be properly read by the search engine spiders. SEO is pretty much common sense, search engines are text analysis systems so if your webpage is full of images with little text and very few pages then your website will not rank high.
You need to target each keyword/phrase on different pages. So if you want to target the search terms “website development” you need to have one page with the title “website development” and lots of text about website design, engineering and development.
Search Engine Optimisation is a mix of common sense and specialist website building expertise. Type It Tiger has both in abundance.
On the common sense side, for example, if prople are searching for website development then they are likely to use the words “website development” in their search and it is these words that a search engine will look for. So why do people insist on calling their home pages “home” or have their business name on the title of every single page of website. People are not likely to search for the term “Home” or for the name of the company unless they are familiar with it already. This is common sense, but most people make this school boy mistake with their website.
The other aspect of getting high SEO ranking is trust and authority. This is no different than any other business trying to gain trust and a good reputation. In our everyday lives we trust established businesses much more than we trust a new start up. If a new restaurant opened up just down the street from your favourite restaurant you might not want to chance eating there and stick with your favourite restaurant instead. However, if you hear that the new restaurant is gaining a reputation for good food you might then decide to try it out yourself. The same can be said about websites except the trust is won via an algorithm formulated by the search engines. The more links you get from already established trusted (authoritive) sites the more Google will trust you. It makes sense really, because a good website will not link to a rubbish or irrelevant website.
Another aspect of trust is by doing things with the search engines terms and conditions. This means building links naturally and not using keywords excessively. Adding 500 pages in one day is not a natural progression, search engines like websites to expand naturally, anything else and their warning lights flash which means they might penalise your website.
So the only way to obtain high SEO rankings is to do everything by the book – it cannot be done overnight but instead it is a long and arduous process. Rome wasn’t built in a day! This is why you are best advised to instruct a webmaster not only to build your website, but also to manage and maintain it – only then are you likely to organically build a website with a high search engine ranking. This means building websites that are easy to navigate (so users and the crawlers can find every page easily), having lots of good relevant interesting content and plenty of trusted links.
It’s all about making your website the best site on the internet in your chosen field, so appoint Type It Tiger as your webmaster and you shouldn’t go far wrong.