Search Engine Optimisation

As of March 2012 there were 644 million websites on the internet. Multiply that by the number of pages on an average website and then consider all the millions of posts made on social networking sites every day and you start to get a sense of the challenge of getting your website found.

To illustrate I’ve typed in a random search phrase such as “buy Ireland soccer jersey” into Google.ie and can see that there are 1,850,000 websites that satisfy my search criteria!

Now this doesn’t mean there are 1.9m websites selling Ireland soccer jerseys, but it does mean that if you were selling Ireland soccer jerseys and had identified that “phrase” as being relevant for your website, you need to "convince" Google that your site deserves to be ranked above all others. So how do you do it?

There are 3 essential elements that will ultimately determine the success of your website:

1. Research – you need to identify “keywords and phrases” your customers use when they are searching for the products or services you sell. Google provides a very helpful tool called the google Keyword Tool where you can research this and choose the keywords/phrases relevant to your website. Getting this part right will make the next two elements and overall objectives significantly easier.
2. Having chosen your keywords/phrases you then “optimise” your web pages for these keywords/phrases - known as Search Engine Optimisation. This is where it gets more complicated and is beyond this short article, but suffice to say you need to include your chosen keywords/phrases in your page content, in particular places in your page content and also in your metadata [metadata refers to code that presents the page content to a browser].
3. Having optimised your site the final stage is known as Search Engine Marketing. This is on-going activity to drive traffic to your website and influence whether your site appears at the top of page 1 on Google for a particular keyword/phrase, or way down on page 10. This is done by encouraging user engagement with your site [blogs, social media & forums for example], having external websites reference your website [backlinking] and increasing relevant traffic through both off-line and on-line promotion.

Google uses complicated algorithms to determine which site appears where in the search engine results pages. Only Google themselves truly understand these algorithms but Google aim to return results that best match their customers’ needs.

Google will therefore favour those sites that:

- contain the relevant keywords/phrases
- are being regularly updated
- have lots of good quality content & navigation
- good visitor interaction
- high visitor numbers
- good referrals from external websites

A whole industry has built up around getting your website to the top of Google. It takes time, perseverance and a good deal of experience and knowledge. Fortunately that skill and knowledge is now more affordable than ever.

The rewards for a successful on-line marketing strategy are significant and predictable. If you’d like to understand your on-line opportunities in more detail please get in touch and we’ll be happy to demonstrate this to you, and provide an estimate should you wish to proceed further.