Search Engine Optimisation
What is Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)?
Why do you need search engine optimisation?
Popular Search Engines
Another Reason Why :
A new study from NPD Group* found that search listings are more effective than standard banner or button advertisements when it comes to brand recall, favourable opinion rating and inspiring purchases.
In unaided recall, search listings outperformed banners and buttons by three to one.
*Source http://www.nua.com/surveys
What is Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) ?
Search Engine Optimisation, also known as SEO, is the process of increasing the amount of visitors who come to a website by ranking that website higher in the search results of a search engine. The higher a website ranks in the results of a search, the greater the chance is that that site will be visited by a visitor.
Most Internet users will not bother going through pages and pages of search results to find something, so where a website ranks in a search is considered essential in directing more traffic towards that site.
The SEO process usually involves a number of different activities to optimise your website for search engines. These activities include providing "rich" useful and relevant content on your pages, registration of your website with key search engines and search directories, gaining incoming links to your website from other websites, the structure and layout of your WebPages and the use of underlying HTML meta-tags (hidden tags within your page mark-up which describe your page).
SEO also helps to ensure that a website is accessible to a search engine (known as being "search-engine friendly") and improves the chances that the site will be found - and correctly indexed - by the visiting search engine.
Why do you need search engine optimisation ?
Here are some excellent reasons:
Major search engines attract more distinct visitors than almost any other Web site. Yahoo! alone boasts 65 million registered users!
85% of all Internet user sessions involve someone browsing at a search engine*. Your search engine ranking determines a major slice of your site traffic.
Research has shown that users hardly ever go beyond the top 30 search engine rankings for a single search. It is estimated that the top 30 results receive over 90% of search traffic*.
Consumers use search engines to locate and buy goods or to research many decisions (such as choosing a vacation destination, medical treatment or election vote)*.
68% of people using search engines use 2 or more words in their search strings*.
People finding your site via search engines are more qualified targets for your products and services because they have actively sought out your site by typing a search phrase directly related to your site content. It's the perfect web site promotion!
recent U.S. study has found that the World Wide Web contains more than 2.1 billion documents and is growing at the rate of seven million pages per day (source: http://www.cyveillance.com). How do you expect people to find your site?
Search engines should be your very first method of web site promotion. But there's no way to crack search engines. Achieving a high ranking takes a combination of positioning techniques, patience and quality site content.
You need to be very conscious of your search engine positioning. If you're not listed within the first 20 or 30 search engine rankings, you lose traffic, no matter how many engines you submitted your site to. The secret is to use search engine positioning techniques that will rank you higher than your competitors.
Remember that the best way to achieve high rankings is to follow the search engine rules. Keep your content useful, improve your link popularity and always monitor your search engine positioning to aim for a higher rank than your competitors.
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