What is SEO?

You've probably heard the term SEO banded about by marketing teams in corporate companies, but what does SEO actually mean? SEO stands for "Search Engine Optimisation" and is about getting your website ranked as highly up search engines as possible to get more people visiting (and therefore purchasing) on your site.

Lets say you have a website that sells toasters that look like Justin Beiber. You've noticed that when you type in "Justin Beiber toaster" into Google, your site doesn't come up in the first few pages. In fact, you have no idea where it comes up. But you can't find it. Well, SEO would make your website appear further up the rankings in google so more people visit it.

If you've used Google to search for anything before, you'll know it's rare you look past the second or third page of search engine results. An SEO campaign will focus on getting you as close to the top of the rankings as possible. Why is this important? Well, as you can imagine, a website that features on the first page of Google gets a lot more traffic than a site that features on the 5th, 20th or 100th page. More traffic means more potential customers.

When someone searches for "Justin Beiber toaster", it's Google's job to find what it thinks is the most relevant page. It does this by focusing mainly on 3 criteria;

- Popularity. How many people visit the site
- Links. How many other sites are linking to this
- Relevance. How relevant the site is in terms of content.

Now, nobody knows the exact code Google uses to rank pages. We in the SEO business have a good idea of what kind of things Google pays more attention to than others, but nobody knows the exact method used to rank web pages. So SEO companies will optimise your site by changing certain aspects to make it appeal more to the search engines. They will also highlight anything on your site that search engines don't like (such as Flash) and try to rectify it.

To summarise, SEO is the art of making your site appear near the top of google searches. This is done by tailoring your site in such a way so it appeals more to the search engines. SEO can be costly, large companies often spend hundreds of thousands a year, but with a modest budget and careful planning, you can rank right up there with them.
 

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