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Search Engine Optimisation or SEO is the most overlooked aspect when most people go through the process of building a website. Yet it is probably the most important aspect of building a new website.

The reality is that when people search online, typically 90% of them will only click on the websites that appear on page 1 of the search resuts. This means if your website is not on Page 1 then it pretty much is invisible.

Do you remember why you wanted a website for your business in the first place?

Most people would respond using one or more of the following answers:

1. To let people can find out more about me
2. To let people find out about the products or services I offer
3. So people can find my contact details
4. To let people do business with me by buying from me online or emailing me

The reality is that all of these reasons are irrelevant if people simply cannot find your website when they are looking for you online.

How do People Find Your Website?

Ask yourself, “How will people find my website?”

Well, people search in a number of ways. They may search for your business name; your personal name or they may even search for your product or service in their local area.

Search Engine Optimisation Defined

Seach Engine Optimisation is simply the collection of tasks that are done to make sure your website is “optimized” or can be found by people searching for either you or your products and services online.

It is a collection of tasks that involve:

1. Understanding the “key words” people use to research and then to buy your product or service using search engines
2. Making sure your website includes these “keywords” in such a way that the search engines will understand what your website is all about
3. Making there are no technical issues which might stop the search engines from accessing your website to determine what it is about
4. And finally promoting your website online in such a way that Google will choose to rank your website higher than other websites on the same topic.

How to I get higher Rankings in the Search Engines?

Once you have a website that is optimized to target your right “keywords” the next step is to focus on marketing or promoting it.

On the Internet this process of marketing is all about getting back links to your website.

At this point you are probably asking, “What is a backlink?” Well a back link is simply a link from one website to another one.

Whenever you can click on the blue highlighted link on a website and it takes you to another website, that is a link.

Google and the other search engines view the quantity and the quality of these links as a sort of vote of confidence in your website.

All things being equal if your website has more and better quality links than a competitors website then typically Google will rank your website higher than the competitors.

The other indicator to the search engines is called the “Anchor text” This is simply the text that people use to make “clickable” when linking to your website.

For example if you sold Red Widgets and there were a large number of links to your website with the anchor text “Red Widgets”, then that is a pretty good signal to Google that your site is all about Red Widgets”

Link Building is marketing

Remember when I said once your website is up you need to begin marketing it?

Well online marketing is all about attracting these quality links.

It’s about figuring out how to get people to want to link to your website with the right anchor text.

Ways to get links include:

1. Ask your suppliers or customers to link to you
2. Enter your business details in free and paid online directories
3. Write great topical or relevant industry articles and content that people want to share with their visitors and that will cause people to link to.
4. Do article marketing where you write articles that are published on article directories. These articles attract links back to you as well as traffic as people read your content and come to see what you are all about.

Key Things to Remember

If SEO is considered at the beginning of the website design process you have the opportunity to make sure you are targeting the right keywords and customers online and to write your website content accordingly.

A couple of key issues to remember include:

1. You want to focus on making sales. The goal is to get visitors to your website who want to buy something from you. It makes no sense for your website to appear for searches for the term “Free Widgets” if you want to sell widgets.
2. It’s all about the text of your website. Don’t get caught up in flashy animated sites that are difficult for the search engines to understand.
3. Ask your website designer to explain what they know about SEO. There are some simple things that all website builders can do to ensure your website is search engine friendly. Ask as many questions as you need to make sure that they know enough about SEO to build your website correctly.

This article is kindly written by:
Edmund Pelgen - Market Reach SEO
w: www.marketreachseo.com.au