This article was originally intended to be more of an appendix to the Website Fundamentals series, as when I started planning this series (longer ago than you may think), SEO simply wasn’t for everyone. It’s a fairly specialised and targeted form of marketing, and like most forms of marketing, there is a significant cost involved, whether in time or money. While all that is still true, SEO has become much more important for everyone it seems, with significant increases in the use of Search Engines to find service providers locally, nationally and internationally, and also general increases in Internet use and understanding.

Definition of SEO

Search Engine Optimisation (abbr. SEO) is simply a term describing the process that seeks to improve the volume of traffic to a website from Search Engines by increasing the ranking that website has on the Search Engines. The basics of how to do this are described below, but the important thing to understand is that it is necessary if Search Engine rankings are what you’re after.

Is it relevant for your website?

To decide whether SEO is relevant for you website, you need to go back to the purpose and audience of your website, and have a bit of a think about how you were planning to let people know about your website. A lot of my clients are fine to have their website as a contact point between traditional forms of advertising and a phone call. This allows the visitor to get a better feel for the company before they ring, and also means that they may be better able to ask the right questions when they call by reading the information on the site. Most of these companies are local businesses with a relatively small service area that rely heavily on directory advertising and newspaper ads. The website in their case is more about building confidence and providing information than it is specifically a form of marketing. For these companies, SEO is simply not relevant, or not worth the cost.

The companies or websites that SEO is relevant for usually meet one or more of the following criteria:

• They operate part of their businesses online (online sales);
• They appeal to an audience over a large geographical area (interstate, national, international);
• They appeal to an audience that utilises search engines to find product and services;
• Their business is specifically related to the Web;
• They provide information, products or services that are hard to come by;

This is by no means a complete list, but it will cover the vast majority of reasons you should look into SEO. If you’re not sure, the best thing you can do is talk to someone.

The absolute basics

The simplest considerations made by a Search Engine when looking at your site are: “What term (or keyword) best describes this page?” and “Is the information on this page valuable to the person searching?” I can bust a common misconception for you right now. The ‘keywords’ of your webpage are not set by the ‘keywords’ meta-tag. It’s not entirely useless, but Search Engines have become smarter than that and they now spider an entire page to discover its keywords. This helps to avoid search engine ‘spamming’ and leads to more relevant search results.

What this means is that if the content of your website doesn’t match up with the keywords or search terms people are using to find your business, you will simply not be found. Therefore the first thing you need to discover about your target audience is what keywords they’re typing in to search engines to find you. Next, you need to make sure the text on your website contains multiple occurrences of those keywords, and that the rest of the text on your website is relevant to and supportive of those keywords.

So the most basic tenet of SEO is this: “Find out what your audience wants, and give it to them.” Sound familiar? Exactly, it’s what marketing experts have been telling us to do for years. The methods used in SEO to do this can be fairly specific, but the idea is the same.

The rest of the methods used by SEO experts to increase traffic to your website, such as increasing incoming links to your site, improving site structure and navigation, and making good use of meta-tags, are all necessary, but secondary to the content of your site.

Where to go to get it done right

Be careful when looking for a genuine SEO specialist company. Despite the fact that SEO has now been around for a number of years, it is still a bit of a mystery to most people. Some companies take advantage of this and charge phenomenal fees for simple SEO campaigns. Having said that, professional SEO does cost more than most people think. A startup campaign shouldn’t cost you more than about $6,500. Remember that in this, your website will be exposed to a larger potential audience than any business directory, which charge similar rates for some of their ads. Also remember that SEO is like any form of marketing, when professionals are involved, it costs a heck of a lot of money.

Search Engine Optimisation is something that is tricky to get your head around at the best of times. If you’re thinking that it’s something your website needs, please, do some research. Some of the best SEO companies around provide a great deal of valuable information on their websites, two of the most useful being Stepforth and Websight Australia. I’ve tried to avoid doing this in most articles, but this is an area that can be extremely costly if not handled properly, so if you’d like some advice, please feel free to call Run Web Design. We’ll do our best to guide you through the process.

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