What Is Search Engine Optimisation

Most people who have ever switched on a computer have heard the term Search Engine Optimisation or SEO for short, but the majority of them would look at you with a blank face if you asked them… What is Search Engine Optimisation.

In this article, we give you the rundown on what search engine optimisation is, how it can benefit you and how you can apply basic SEO to your website or blog.

So… What Is Search Engine Optimisation

Search Engine Optimisation is the practice of optimising your website or blog and the pages contained in each, so that search engines can identify exactly what your page is about, and how relevant your page is to a particular search term.

The more relevant your page is to a particular search term is one of the factors search engines take into account when placing your site/page(s) within the search engine rankings for a particular keyword or keyphrase.

Another major factor search engines use for indexing and ranking your site, is the amount of backlinks that are pointing to your site, from other websites. Each backlink is considered a “vote” for your site, but not all backlinks are considered equal. Search engines determine the weight of each link by different factors such as: relevancy of the linking site compared to yours, page ranking of the external site and the relevancy of the anchor text within the link.

The structure of your internal linking is also a factor search engines will consider when ranking your site and it’s pages. It is important to have an organised linking structure between your home page and your sub-level pages.

How Can Search Engine Optimisation Benefit You

The main objective of search engine optimisation is to achieve high rankings within the search results so we can get loads of free (organic) traffic to our website or blog.

When you do a search for a keyword on Google, you will notice two parts to the results: The results on the right are paid advertisements (and can cost quite a lot per click), the results on the left are what’s known as “organic listings” and are the most relevant websites and webpages (in the eyes of the search engines) for that particular keyword.

This is where Search Engine Optimisation comes into play, as we want our listings to be highly placed within the organic listings, which will bring large amounts of free online traffic (depending on the popularity of the chosen keyword).

Basic SEO Techniques

• Include your target keyword in your URL (the closer to the left the better).

• Include your target keyword in your title, sub headings and meta data.

• Include your target keyword at approximately 3% density in comparison to your article.

• Bold, underline and italicise your target keyword once each per article.

• Link your target keyword to a relevant webpage (one of your own pages, or another relevant quality site).

• Choose an SEO friendly theme for your blog.

• Use blog commenting to build high quality external links.

• Use RSS feeds like Google Reader to build backlinks.

• Use social media (like Twitter, Facebook and Digg) to build traffic and backlinks.

• Get involved with social bookmarking sites (like Stumbleupon and Delicious) to build traffic and backlinks.

• Always write unique, relevant, good quality content.

There are loads of things you can do to improve and constantly work on as far as search engine optimisation goes. The above tips are the by no means an exhaustive list, but will give you a great start with basic SEO for your website.

Hopefully this article has given you an insight into – What Is Search Engine Optimisation.

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