Getting your website found
Our Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) specialists make sure that your website gets seen by the right people at the right time.
What is a Search Engine?
Rather than a complicated and geeky explanation, let’s just say that Google is a search engine. And when we talk about search engines, we will always refer to Google. This is simply because it is the most popular by an enormous margin. There are other search engines out there, most notably Bing, and the principles of search engine optimisation are broadly the same regardless of which search engine is being used.
How does Google rank your website?
At this point it is worth considering the process that Google uses to rank your website. Put simply, there are three stages:
- Crawling
Google constantly searches the internet for new pages to add to its index. There is no central registry of web pages so Google has to constantly update its own list of known pages. This process is called Crawling. This mammoth task is carried out by Googlebot (sadly not a cute little robot but a piece of software). - Indexing
After a page is discovered, Google tries to understand what the page is about. This process is called Indexing. Google analyses the written content on the page and catalogues images and video files. - Ranking
When a user enters a search term, Google scans through all of the pages it has indexed and ranks them according to relevance for that search term. Google then considers factors such as the user’s location, language and device (are they searching on a desktop or phone?) Google then presents these results in the order that it feels provides the most appropriate answer and best user experience.
What exactly is Search Engine Optimisation?
SEO is the process of ensuring that Google finds your web pages, can easily understand the content and ranks the page highly for the search terms that your customers are likely to use. SEO usually relates to what’s known as “organic” search results, where Google decides on the order to present results.
In the past it was possible to fool Google in to ranking your site highly through clever SEO techniques. However, over the years the algorithms that Google has developed have become more sophisticated. These days there is simply no substitute for quality, up-to-date content. But it doesn’t end there. This content has to be presented in a way that not only appeals to “real” visitors to the site, but also to the Googlebot that ranks it against various key words or phrases that a typical user may search for.
Every website we build is optimised to perform for the search terms most appropriate to your business. However, this can take a little time, especially for new businesses in competitive markets. Under these circumstances, Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising can be used to improve performance in the short term. You can read more about this HERE