Everyone’s talking about Search Engine Optimization (SEO), so what EXACTLY is SEO?
In a nutshell, it involves optimising a website such that it is able to rank high in the search engines.
Search engines are the number one way that internet users find websites. In most cases, a listing in a search engine is free. So, it’s no surprise that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is often the first priority when marketing a website.
Proper search engine optimization can bring you hundreds –possibly thousands– of visitors every day, and at no cost to you.
To find information on the hundreds of millions of Web pages that exist, a Search Engine employs special software robots, called spiders, to crawl all the sites they can find.
So is there any specific search engine you should concentrate on ranking well for, you might ask?
Yes of course!
According to the latest statistics, Google now commands over 75% of the global search engine market. Whilst not every web surfer uses a major search engine, the majority do. And out of this majority, eight of every ten go to Google as their search engine of choice.
Whilst this does not mean that you can afford to ignore the other major search engines such as Yahoo! and the newly launched Microsoft Bing, your main focal point must be Google.
Most people who use the net do so because they need information or advice. Whilst there are billions of dollars changing hands every day online, the majority of people do not go online to spend money. They want answers to their questions or solutions to their problems, and the net is the most convenient place to look for what they need.
They search by typing in a word or phrase that describes what they are looking for before hitting the enter button. When they do so, they will see a search results page something like this (this is for ‘hair loss’):
At the top left hand corner of the page and all down the right side are paid advertising materials, where companies and individuals who have a hair loss product pay Google to show advertising on hair loss related search pages. Hence, these adverts are highly targeted, but they are not cheap either.
The top ‘hair loss’ advertiser – generally, the one whose advert is shown at the top left hand corner of the page – is paying $4.79 per click on their advert, meaning that they are spending around $770 a day on advertising.
Remember, this is per click on their advert and has nothing whatsoever to do with making a sale, so unless their adverts are converting visitors into customers at a healthy rate, they could be losing a lot of money.
However, your main focus is on the ‘natural’ or ‘organic’ search results beneath the adverts on the left, because this is where you want to be.
These natural results feature web pages or promotional materials where the owner has done everything they can to make that individual page attractive to the search engines.
If you can manage to do this successfully enough to grab the number one natural search result ‘slot’, Google estimate that around 42% of visitors who land on this top search results page will visit your site first!
From this single statistic, you can clearly see the power of making your blog or site as search engine friendly as possible.
Tomorrow we’ll continue with on-site and off-site optimization. So just stay tuned for that!
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