Search Engine Optimisation – Basics

For those of you who aren’t sure what Search Engine Optimisation is, put simply it’s the process of getting highly targeted traffic to your website via the search engines. Search Engine Optimisation is often known as SEO or SEM (Search Engine Marketing).

It’s no good having a nicely designed website if no one visits it. You can direct people to it via business cards, company literature but that really is a drop in the ocean.

The trick of SEO is to drive the people who are searching for what your website offers to your website. Depending on what market you are in, there are potentially hundreds of thousands of searches every day, the trick is getting those people to your site, to do that you need to have good search engine rankings, that is to appear highly in the search engine results for your chosen keywords.

SEO takes time and it needs to be done properly and constantly so that your site continually gets the best targeted traffic possible.

There are a number of things you need to do to ensure you rank well for your chosen search terms. I will cover each of these in a separate post but some of the main areas are

Keywords and keyword research
Meta Data
Title Tag
Content
Headings
URL’s
Links and Link building
Off page optimisation

I will cover what I consider to be the cornerstone of good SEO – keyword research in the next post.