Tag Archives: search results

How Important Is Search Engine Optimisation to Online Business?

The internet has completely revolutionised the way people live. Ten years ago music, movies and games were purchased in high street stores. Today they can be downloaded or streamed from anywhere using hand held digital devices such as tablet computers or even mobile phones. We used to rely on phone books and yellow pages to find shops and tradesmen but today it is the internet where we find what we need. Shopping habit is also changing rapidly with internet driving more and more sales every year. People have become very used to buying and selling online through online marketplace and e-commerce portals such as amazon, ebay, taobao, lacartes and many others.

For businesses internet has become an important source of revenue. The running of an online business is not that different to running an offline business. A shop would invest a lot of money and time to get the right location – usually a busy location in the right town, where it can be seen by a lot of potential customers with genuine interests in its products and services. Online businesses apply the same principle and invest a lot of money and time to be seen by the right crowd – people with genuine interests in its products and services.

When people search for a particular product or service, they are expressing a genuine interest in that product or service so it is highly likely they would commit to a purchase. This makes search engine traffic highly valuable and it is why many online businesses allocate majority of their operating budget to search engine optimisation (also known as SEO) in order to appear at the top of search results for the right search keywords.

Businesses at the top of search results are looked at first so they have the best chance of making a sale. Getting to the top of search engine search results is the holy grail of online advertising. Search engines channel so much traffic every day they can literally drive millions of potential customers to a business. Therefore search engine optimisation or SEO is extremely important to any online business.

SEO refers to methods and techniques that can improve a website’s position in search results for the most relevant keywords. There is an entire industry devoted to SEO. They offer their expertise and services to help businesses increase their search engine traffic.

The main advantage of running an online business is the lower cost base because it doesn’t require any retail space. This leaves businesses with more money to invest in advertising and marketing. Business owners and webmasters should invest generously in SEO and think of it as the same thing as paying extra for a shop in the right location.

What Is Search Engine Optimization? An Introduction

Any business who’s serious about establishing a strong web presence have to maximise the traffic and exposure from search engines because they are capable of driving millions of potential customers to a business. Search engine optimisation (SEO) refers to the methods and techniques that can improve a website’s ranking (or visibility) on search engine results. There is a whole industry devoted to SEO.

To understand search engine optimisation, one must first understand how search engines compile their results.

How do search engines generate search results

Search engine companies have created computer programs that robotically scan the internet and gather information on all the websites they find. These computer programs or ‘bots’ are called spiders because their job is to ‘crawl’ the ‘web’. These ‘crawlers’ download information from each website, which are then stored in the search engine’s database.

When someone carries out a search, the search engine compares the search keyword(s) against the information in their database. In a fraction of a second, search engine’s powerful super computers search through billions of websites in their database and pick out a list that match the user’s criteria. Websites that are deemed most relevant are displayed at the top of the search results.

Each search engine has its own unique proprietary formula to determine relevance and the exact formulas are usually closely guarded trade secrets. It is said Google’s formula contains over 200 variables. Although the exact formulas are unknown, there are a number of variables that are known to influence a website’s search results ranking.

Common SEO methods

SEO companies like to divide different techniques into two broad categories: onsite SEO and offsite SEO.

Onsite SEO refers to modifications a webmaster can do to their own website to improve its search results ranking such as search engine friendly URL, effective meta tags, internal links and sitemap.

The most talked about and widely emphasised offsite SEO variable is link popularity. Virtually all SEO companies provide some form of link popularity service. Link popularity refers to the quantity and quality of a website’s back links. Quality can be affected by a number of factors: whether the originating website is in the same sector, whether the link has relevant anchor text, the page rank score (PR) or link popularity of the originating website and the link’s visibility.

Webmaster should always try to get the best quality links and get as many of them as possible. Quantity is key but sometimes quality can be more important. For example a link coming from a highly relevant website with PR5 score could be worth more than ten PR0 links.

How Important Is Search Engine Optimisation to Online Business?

The internet has completely revolutionised the way people live. Ten years ago music, movies and games were purchased in high street stores. Today they can be downloaded or streamed from anywhere using hand held digital devices such as tablet computers or even mobile phones. We used to rely on phone books and yellow pages to find shops and tradesmen but today it is the internet where we find what we need. Shopping habit is also changing rapidly with internet driving more and more sales every year. People have become very used to buying and selling online through online marketplace and e-commerce portals such as amazon, ebay, taobao, lacartes and many others.

For businesses internet has become an important source of revenue. The running of an online business is not that different to running an offline business. A shop would invest a lot of money and time to get the right location – usually a busy location in the right town, where it can be seen by a lot of potential customers with genuine interests in its products and services. Online businesses apply the same principle and invest a lot of money and time to be seen by the right crowd – people with genuine interests in its products and services.

When people search for a particular product or service, they are expressing a genuine interest in that product or service so it is highly likely they would commit to a purchase. This makes search engine traffic highly valuable and it is why many online businesses allocate majority of their operating budget to search engine optimisation (also known as SEO) in order to appear at the top of search results for the right search keywords.

Businesses at the top of search results are looked at first so they have the best chance of making a sale. Getting to the top of search engine search results is the holy grail of online advertising. Search engines channel so much traffic every day they can literally drive millions of potential customers to a business. Therefore search engine optimisation or SEO is extremely important to any online business.

SEO refers to methods and techniques that can improve a website’s position in search results for the most relevant keywords. There is an entire industry devoted to SEO. They offer their expertise and services to help businesses increase their search engine traffic.

The main advantage of running an online business is the lower cost base because it doesn’t require any retail space. This leaves businesses with more money to invest in advertising and marketing. Business owners and webmasters should invest generously in SEO and think of it as the same thing as paying extra for a shop in the right location.