Making Sense of Search Engine Optimisation
It seems everywhere you turn these days,
somebody is talking about SEO. It’s not just another acronym used by
techno-heads to bamboozle the rest of us. SEO is a valuable business
marketing tool with the potential to significantly increase your
organisation’s exposure and pulling power on the Internet. So how does
it work?
Every day, every hour, every minute, potential
customers are searching the world wide web for information about the
services or products they require. More than 350 million searches are
conducted each day! How do you get a piece of that action? With more
than 5 billion pages on the Internet, unless your website is optimised
to satisfy their search efforts, your chances of being found are
miniscule. That’s where SEO comes into play.
The major search
engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN work by sending “spiders” out to
crawl the web and catalogue/index pages. Complex algorithms decide
which pages are listed and how they are ranked against certain
searches.
SEO
consultants apply their understanding of how these “spiders” and
algorithms combine to your website, giving your targeted
audience/customer base a much better chance of finding that needle in
the haystack (you). It’s the cyber equivalent of moving your print ad
from the back page to the front page (and with spot colour!) or
relocating your bricks and mortar shop from the backblocks to the busy
CBD. The result is increased customer traffic, improved sales leads and
stronger branding opportunities, whether you’re trading locally or
globally.
Studies show that searchers rarely look beyond the
first three pages of search results (many don’t go past the first
page). SEO helps your website rank higher in search engine results,
thus increasing your chances of being noticed by customers –
“qualified” customers who are proactively looking for you.
The
companion acronym to SEO is PPC - Pay Per Click advertising, which is
often part of a blended SEO campaign. PPC is cost-per-action
advertising using the “sponsored listings” appearing prominently on
search engine results pages. It provides predictable, immediate and
measurable results and the opportunity to specifically target
geographic or market groups.
SEO has the potential to deliver
substantial benefits at a very low cost by maximising the natural
advantages of your existing website such as content, linking
relationships and popularity. Results of SEO are not always instant –
the search engines take time to crawl the huge expanse of the web, but
an effective SEO campaign can return real benefits to your organisation
for years to come.
 If
that all sounds too good to be true, you’re right. There are some
pitfalls with SEO that are unavoidable. SEO influences but does not
control the search engine results, so there are no guarantees. Search
engine operators constantly review and adjust their algorithms to
ensure the integrity of search results, so the efficacy of an SEO
campaign relies on it being refined and re-implemented accordingly.
Crudely-executed SEO campaigns can actually attract search engine
penalties and negatively affect your on-line presence.
SEO will
almost certainly give your website more grunt. But only a professional
SEO consultant with plenty of web marketing experience can determine
the best path to delivering those results – a nimble, energetic but
very well-considered SEO strategy that responds to the specifics of
your business.
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