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What is Search Engine Optimisation, and do I care?

Posted 18 April 2007 at 8:28AM by Simon Dickson in Managing your website

Search engine optimisation (or SEO) is a subject we mention here on a regular basis. If your company has a website, and you're hoping it'll generate a bit of business, it's something you need to have thought about. So to get us started on the subject, here's a quick definition of what SEO is, and why it matters.

Simply put, SEO is the process of designing, developing and promoting your website in ways which score the most points when the search engines try to establish a ranking order for a given word or phrase. But there's a catch. The search engines don't publish details of precisely how the scores are calculated; and besides, they tweak their methods regularly, to improve the relevance and accuracy of results, and to exclude activities which might be considered cheating.

So nobody knows definitively where the goalposts are, and they'll probably move when you find them. Having said that, there are a number of things which are known to be included in the calculations, and will definitely improve your positioning. And even better, many of these have zero cost implication, as long as you (or your web designers) have factored them into your site design or construction.

For example, as Alexa mentioned here a few weeks back, a surprising number of websites overlook the HTML <TITLE> tag. Think of it from the search engines' perspective: they're just machines. They can read text but they can't understand it, so they have to look for places in your page code which might give clues to the subject of the page. And if a particular word features in the <TITLE> of a page, chances are that it's very relevant to what the page is about.

Why does it matter? Two reasons: because searching is becoming the main method by which people get to a site, and because people are shockingly unlikely to look beyond the top few entries in their search results.

Web traffic analysts Hitwise say that a quarter of all website visits come from a single source - namely, Google. Another Hitwise study last year showed that 39% of traffic to travel agency websites came as a result of clicks from search results; and that figure had risen 7% in six months - described by Hitwise's Heather Hopkins as a 'huge gain for such an established category'. Websites selling insurance and electronics recorded similar figures, with even faster growth rates.

It's also been proven that sites at the top of the search results get significantly more attention. A 2005 study found that whilst the top three results were seen by all readers, only half would bother to scroll beyond the first screen-ful, and barely 20% would reach the bottom. This focus on the top few results is dramatically illustrated by this heatmap graphic.

So what do you do about it? You need to develop an understanding of the words people are likely to use when looking for websites like yours, and use them in all the right places. You need to ensure your site (and each page within it) is coded in ways which help search engines do their work. You need to get good websites to link to you, effectively as a 'third party endorsement' of your site. You need to keep your pages fresh, and ideally, expanding.

If that sounds daunting, don't worry - it is. But there's a lot you can do yourself to improve matters, and we'll look at some methods here on the blog on the coming weeks. If it all gets too much, there's a growing number of SEO consultants out there; or you could just buy your way to the top with 'sponsored link' advertising.

Tags: eyetrack, google, hitwise, ranking, search engine optimisation

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