Why do you need search engine optimisation?
Search engine optimisation is an online marketing strategy that involves designing, writing and coding your entire website with the intention of enabling search engines to index your site easily and rank it higher for keywords relevant to your business.
Search engine usage
Over 49% of business professionals use the internet as their primary source of information. Over 60% of internet users discover new businesses and websites through search engines. That means on any given day millions of searches are being performed online. Optimising your website for search engine visibility increases the probability that web searchers will visit your website.
Obtaining search engine and directory listings
Certain search engines, such as Google crawl through interlinked web pages, build lists of words and phrases found on each web page and discover new sites through links on these pages. For spider-based search engines the best way to get indexed and listed is by optimising your site and then making sure other sites that are already listed link to yours.
Other search destinations such as Yahoo! are based on directories that are compiled by human editors and have lists of websites indexed with the site title and description. The only way to get listed on a directory is to closely follow their submission guidelines and submit your website using their online submission form. Optimising the header section of your HTML pages is most important to get properly listed on most directories.
Search engine rankings
Merely getting listed and indexed on a search engine is no longer enough to bring you business. Google has over 8 billion websites in its index. For your website to shine out and rank high for relevant searches, it is imperative that you optimise it for those keywords.
Search engine optimisation endeavours to design web pages with the intention of getting them to rank higher on the search engine results pages. Without optimisation, you site will more likely than not be lost among the millions of other sites.
Click here to learn how to optimise your website for higher search rankings
