How Does Search Engine Optomisation Work?

"Search engine optimisation is the process of manipulating web pages in order to achieve a higher position on a search engine listing."

Why Do People Use Search Engines?

There are over 8 billion webpage's on the Internet and this figure is growing daily. How can anyone find what they are looking for in the midst of so much information?

The answer is through search engines. Search engines allow users to type in a phrase relating to the information they are looking for and the search engine will scan through all the pages on the web, routing out the ones they think are most closely related to what the user is looking for. The results or hits are then ranked in order of relevance.

Why Do Companies Want to Achieve a High Ranking for Certain Keywords?

It is reported that over 80% of web users utilise search engines to find information and 75% of users intend on buying something when they perform a search. As a result companies want to be included in the search engine listings when a search is done relating to their business. It is also estimate however that 90% of people do not go beyond the first thirty results generated by a search engine and so it is not enough for a company to be listed in any place on the search engines list. To be found through a search like this it is necessary for a company to appear in the top fifteen or twenty hits.

What Can I Do to Rank Higher in a Search Engine Listing?

To achieve a high ranking in a search engine list, it is necessary to understand how search engines work. (Unless of course you are getting someone else to do it for you)

Remember that search engines are on the side of the individual and are constantly trying to invent improved algorithms which will weed out commercial sites and give the user a higher quality of useful websites. Therefore whilst you can design your website in a way that search engines look favourably on, it is still impossible to guarantee that you will rank highly for you chosen keyword or phrase.

So lets get technical. Search engines use spiders or robots to navigate through all of the pages that are listed with the search engine. The spider assembles an index of every word on each web page against the page address. It is then weighted and stored in a database on the web server. When users perform a keyword search the index is searched and the most relevant pages are listed. Different search engines assemble their indexes differently but in general page title, keyword frequency, links and graphic text are influential when ranking web pages.

The page title should be relevant to the company, products and offers. The website content should contain the chosen keywords in both the main body and headings. It is important not to go overkill on using your keywords as this will reduce the readability of the page and you may actually be penalised by the search engines. Graphics should be appropriately named so that they are recognised by the spiders. Some search engines place a higher weighting on web pages that have many outgoing and incoming links, particularly if these links are coming from established and respected sites.

Things to Avoid when Trying to Optimise Your Website

A web page with one large graphic stands to be ignored by a search engine because the search engine algorithm cannot read the text on a graphic and will not rank the page highly on a search.

Graphics should not be used for headings as the search engine spiders cannot read them.

Frames are sometimes used in web sites to section the page into independent regions. They should be used with caution because search engines cannot see the content within the frame. Workarounds can be found to deal with this problem but generally non-framed sites will still rank higher.

Flash pages can also interfere with the search engine algorithms because there is not enough content. Google has the ability to follow links in flash objects but most of the other major search engines cannot.

A site should be wary of having too many outgoing links or it may be branded as a link farm by the search engines. Google suggests that a website should have a maximum of one hundred outgoing links.