An introduction to Search Engine Optimisation.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) enables a business or organisation to improve the quality and the amount of traffic driven to their website from search engines such as Google and Yahoo. When people search for goods and services on the internet they can receive thousands of results ranked in order of relevancy. It is the search engines that decide which websites are relevant to a particular search term and rank them accordingly.
SEO is the process of creating or redesigning a website so that it ranks higher in the search engine listings. The higher up the list a website appears, the more visitors it will receive and the more business it is likely to generate. Most people do not look beyond the first few pages of listings when carrying out a search. If your site does not appear among the first fifty search results, it is unlikely that potential customers will find your website. In order to achieve high search results SEO experts use a number of different methods. It is important thing to be aware of the fact that there are good and bad ways of optimising a website. These are known as white hat and black hat tactics.
Black hat tactics or spamdexing occurs when SEO companies or web designers provide search engines with false or misleading information in order to receive a higher ranking. This is done in several ways. One tactic is to provide different content to search engines and human visitors e.g. entering invisible keywords into the html source code. This will be read by the search engine but won’t appear on the web pages. Another method used is to pack the homepage with misleading or irrelevant keywords and content in order to attract people onto the site. Drawing people to a website using any methods that involve deception is considered spamdexing. The simple rule is never use black hat tactics. As well as being deceitful, it is becoming increasingly difficult to get away with, as search engines now look out for sites that use spamdexing. Using spamdexing can result in your website being banned from search engine listings.
White hat tactics are not clearly defined as a set of rules, but there are guidelines that can help. Major search engines publish guidelines on the do’s and don’ts of optimising for search engines. If you are staying within these guidelines and not trying to deceive your visitors, you are probably using white hat tactics. The simplest way to avoid problems is to create your web content for your users, not for search engines.
When choosing an SEO expert make sure they follow a good code of practice. Ask them what tactics they use to optimise websites. Many of the better practices include redesigning or designing and building sites that are relevant to your industry and organisation. This is often the best way of optimising your site for search engines. They should be performing keyword research to determine the key phrases related to your business. A good web designer will create websites that are constructed with quality code and incorporate relevant key words. They should also provide a quality link building campaign and supply a monthly analytical report detailing your website’s progress.
White hat SEO is of course the more ethical route to take when optimising for search engines. Using white hat techniques takes longer to set up, and may initially be more expensive but the benefits easily out weigh using black hat techniques. Applying black hat tactics is like a quick cheap fix, that will always let you down in the end. When you optimise a website using white hat tactics you are ensuring that your search engine optimisation will last longer and work better. Unlike black hat users you also have peace of mind that your website will stay listed on all major search engines. (Back to Web Articles Page)