Understanding the basics of SEO

Over eighty percent of people use search engines to find products and services, so search optimisation is important for your business success.

The objective of a search engine is to deliver a quality results to people searching on the web for a product or service. These results will hopefully provide websites with relevant information  to the customer.

Your ranking dictates where your listing will appear when people search for your primary keyword or term. Ideally you need to be on the first page of results. Understanding how your ranking is determined is the key to getting your best ranking.

The aim of this post is to provide a simple non-technical idea of SEO and things you should be focusing on.

Two components to SEO

There are two essential components to SEO:

1. On-site optimisation, how easy it is for the search engine to gather information and the quality of your site. This accounts for about 10-20% of ranking.
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3. Off-site optimisation which accounts for 80-90% of your ranking. This determines the authourity and reputation your site has in the market, or in other words how many people are talking about your site.

On-site optimisation

As the name suggest this component deals with the information you present on your website and the  ezimerchant technical code your site is built upon.

ezimerchant has taken a lot of the hard work away for you by making it easy for search engines to crawl your site and gain all the necessary information. In addition ezimerchant utilises Rich Snippets to allow search engines to present in their results an image associated with your product. 

Selecting a Keyword

It is important that your copy incorporates the  keywords you are optimising on your site, what search terms will your site appears from searches. You want to ensure that your site has relevance for the people you are attracting.

If you have not already determined your keywords, this is a good time to do it. Using tools like Google AdWords Keyword Tool can help determine the importance of the term, how many people search the term, and alternative keywords.

When selecting a keyword, it is pointless picking keywords where you have to compete with larger players. For example, if you picked a keyword in the music industry that the likes of Sony and other large players use, you will not be able to match their link popularity.

Off-site optimisiation

To maximise your ranking you need to gain an off-site presence, getting people to link to your site and talk about your products. Any offsite activities you conduct should be part of your wider marketing campaign to engage and reach your target market, marketing activities and SEO optimisation are closely aligned.

Listing on others websites

You want to aim to get other sites to link back to your website and/or products. The more important and visits the other site gets the more weight this link will have in your rankings. Gone are the days of link farms, google is too clever.

Directories

Directories are a good way to get listed and gain awareness with your potential customers. While it is easy to get added to a list, it is the same for your competitors.

Social media

Social media provides you with a great opportunity to engage your customers base and increase the level of discussion about your website. If you are to busy to keep on top of all the social media services you can use services like Hootsuite to schedule messages at different times of the day across several services.

Blogs

Blogs provide you with a great vehicle to educate and keep your customers up to date with trends in your market. In addition blogs help keep your website content up-to-date and provide an opportunity to share posts with business partners, helping grow each others web presences.

Remember if you start a blog you regularly need to add content, there is nothing worse than going to a company blog site that has not been updated for over a year.

Summary

There are a lot of articles from on the web about SEO optimisation with many of these articles being highly technical and companies claiming to be SEO experts. A good rule of thumb is when you can’t understand what you are being told, don’t spend money with that company.

SEO should be common sense, if you understand the needs of your customers, communicate and engage with them online, your rankings will look after themselves.