Search Engine Optimisation

SEO: What is it? Do I need it? Can I have some please?

The Myth

Now let's make this clear ... Search Engine Optimisation (or SEO as it's often abbreviated as) is not a technical product ... you can't buy it and it is simply not possible to "guarantee" a high ranking and deliver thousands or millions of visitors to your website.

The Reality

Search engine companies spend £millions trying to perfect the art of finding and displaying stuff which people are looking for ... their robots are continually indexing websites all over the internet so that they can match them up with the words people use to search with.

Your website is one of billions out there competing for attention ... so how do you get to the top of the list?

Well, there are two ways to approach the problem ...

The hard way

First up ... identify your "list" ... You can't possibly hope to get to the top of every search anyone ever makes ... and even if you did attract that many visitors your site would collapse under the weight of all that trafffic!

... So you need to think which searches you want to focus on ... and that means working out which words people will use to do those searches ...

Assuming you manage to complete this infinite task and survive the inevitable headache then all you have to do is use all those words on your website as often as possible and hey-presto you've done it!

The easy way

Forget the search engines ... think of the humans!

What is your business about? What are you trying to sell/publicise? Describe these on your website in words and phrases which your potential customers will find familiar. Highlight the important things, summarise and cross-reference the detail and you're done!

The Techie Bit

Yes, there are some extra things we can do to help ...

• we can make sure that when you highlight something to the human, the robots prioritise it too
• we can make sure you don't forget to add the little details which the robots think are important 
• we can make sure your site is structured in a way which is both human and robot-friendly
• we can mark-up your content so that robots can understand the difference between say a product, an event and a news article

We do all this as a matter of course whenever we develop a website. We don't charge extra for it. It is simply a matter of applying best practice to what we do naturally.

Written by  Sarah Green