Is Search Engine Optimisation Dead?SEO is Dead some people feel, but are they right?
Google has just celebrated it’s 13th Birthday and how the internet has changed during the time it has been around.
Google has led the way in indexing and ranking websites and is still by far the most popular search engine around the world.
The number of websites on the internet reaches into the billions.
Giving a figure will be meaningless as there are hundreds of new websites launched every day (even thousands). So Google has had to rank websites in order to deliver the best results for web users.
SEO (or search engine optimisation) is a complex and constantly changing form of marketing to improve website ranking on search engines such as Yahoo, DuckDuckGo and Ask. Google is the dominant search engine and this is unlikely to change, since it is the default website browser loaded onto most computers and mobile devices).
The process involves getting traffic to your website from organic, free or natural listings on search engines and no payment is involved unlike pay per click ads (PPC) which is another useful tool in driving traffic to websites.
It is broken down to 2 main areas:
All search engines use complex algorithms to rank websites in the UK based on how relevant they think it is to the user’s search query. These algorithms change several times a year as search engines evolve.
The quality of your website content is important, but not everything. Most people say that ‘content is king’, but there is more to SEO than just your website content.
The usability of your site and the amount of backlinks your website has from trustworthy sites can all help to increase your site’s visibility and help you rank higher on the search engine results page (SERPS).
The load speed of your website also now is considered as part of the SEO mix.
The hosting of your website is important (which effects page load speed).
Your social presence is another factor that effect where your appear on the web. When social media landed, platforms like Facebook were disregarded. In the following years, social media is taken into account big time!
Users who have made a relevant search are more likely to click on your website, interact with your brand and make a purchase. If your website gets people returning, this is also taken into account (news websites for example have returning visitors).
What is the point in all the hard work, does SEO work?
The reason that search engines need to rank websites is to deliver the best possible results for visitors. One of the frustrations in the early years was finding relevant websites.
There was not one search engine, but lots of web directories, all giving different results.
As google has developed it’s method of reading and ranking websites, searching has become a lot quicker and hassle free.
The problem however is that all website owners are involved in the SEO arms race to get onto page 1 for their chosen keywords.
Web optimisation used to be all about links. The more links a website had pointing at it, the more popular it was and the higher it was placed in search results.
Search engines were then faced with producing poor results for internet users that were not relevant. So the search engines changed their ranking rules (algorithms).
The old rules of optimisation has now gone (the more links the merrier) and a new set of reading and ranking websites was born.
The way that websites are read and indexed is a secret that is only known to the search engines.
In order to prevent the problems of the past sneaking back (website owners bending rules in order to get their websites onto page 1).
There are a few tips in order to ensure that your website is ranked well and continues to grow on the search results:
1/ Keep It Clean – Keep your website up to date; ensure that spelling mistakes, errors and problems are quickly dealt with.
2/ Keep It Fresh – Search engines love new content, keep adding fresh material to your website in order to keep the search engines coming back
3/ Keep In The News – Press releases are a great optimisation tool for getting your name into the industry. However this changed with the Panda update.
Search optimisation is an art, in many ways it can be compared to many other trades such as cooking, tailoring, engineering, it has to be learned.
People can do optimisation themselves (in the same way we can all cook) but since search engines are constantly changing the way they read websites, businesses need to change with the times.
Choosing a marketing company to handle your SEO can be a challenge, since no SEO company knows exactly how each of the search engines rank UK websites.
Getting some SEO advice is good, or better still, to use an SEO expert in ensuring that your website is growing and being noticed by the search engines on a regular basis.
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