How many sales do you lose through poor SEO
Attempting to promote your website online, often against stifling competition, can seem an impossible prospect especially if you only have limited knowledge of the techniques required. Learn what it takes to get to the top.
1.2 How search engine optimisation works
Search engine optimisation works, then, by optimising your site for search engines in such a way that it brings targeted traffic to your site. By this, we mean Internet users who are actually looking for your products or services (visits from people who are not actually looking for your products or services may increase the number of hits your site gets but is not likely to achieve conversion, i.e. turn visits into sales, or encourage repeat visits).
Therefore, search engine optimisation attempts to bring the right kind of Internet users or potential customers to your site. These users are individuals who have used a search engine like Google, Yahoo, or MSN to find the specific kind of products or services that you offer.
In basic terms, SEO does this by attempting to match key aspects of your page content with the kinds of phrases that people type into search engines when looking for something on the Internet.
1.2.1 A Basic Internet Search
Let us say, for example, that you are an Internet user who is looking to buy a used car online. Besides going to an online auction site such as ebay, you are likely to start your search for a car by going to the home page of a search engine and typing relevant terms into the search box. This is known as a search query.
Here are some of phrases we might type into search engines when looking for a used car:
used cars
buy a used car online
second hand cars
Second hand Automobiles
These collections of words are known as search terms or keyword phrases or keyphrases.
Note: A keyphrase is a collection of words that people actually type into search engines when searching for products or services. As Internet users are becoming more sophisticated, they now tend to string keywords together into keyphrases as this qualifies their searches and produces more specific results.
Of course, the above terms are not the only phrases that people are likely to use when searching for a car online, but they do show you the kind of words people might actually type into search engines. Note that searches are not case sensitive, so it doesn’t matter if people use capitals in their search terms or not.
When we enter one of the above terms into a major search engine, we are presented with a list of results that the search engine believes to be relevant to the term searched for. For example, if we type ‘buy a used car online’ into Google, we are presented with the following page of results:
Google returns the above results as it thinks these are the most relevant WebPages for the particular search query entered. This is known as page relevancy. This does not mean that when you enter a search query, Google visits every page on the web to find the most relevant results. This would take too long. In fact, search engines refer to a collection of web pages that have been indexed prior to your query and cached on there servers. :
When you enter a search query, Google checks that query against its index and the textual content of the web pages it has cached on its servers. It then returns what it believes are the most relevant results for the search query entered.
We will explain how search engines index web pages in the next section of the course
The query above shows the first page of search results returned by Google for the search ‘buy a used car online’. Of course, there are more pages of results that follow – in fact Google informs us that this page only shows ‘Results 1-10 of about 23,900,000’. The important thing about this page, however, is that it shows us the pages that the search engine thinks are most relevant for our search term.
Note: search engine results are hierarchical, meaning that results are ranked according to their perceived relevance, with the most relevant results appear higher in the listings - i.e. on the first page of results - and the less relevant lower down in the listings, i.e. on later pages.
We have all seen this kind of page before. Note however that Google has highlighted certain words for every result it has returned. If we look at the page in first position for example, it highlights the following words:
‘Buy new & used cars online, research prices & dealers, sell your ...
Cars.com is your online source to buy new and used cars. Sell your used car, or research car prices, reviews and more.’
Now compare these words with our original search term ‘buy a used car online’. Note how the individual keywords from our search phrase appear throughout this listing, i.e., ‘buy’, ‘used’ ‘car(s)’, ‘online’. The same holds for all the other results returned on the first page. Because this page includes all the terms we have used in our search, the search engine has deemed it a relevant page for our specific search term.
This example allows us to outline a few important points.
- The search engine is trying to match the search query, or the keyphrase that we have entered, with the textual content of individual web pages.
- This means that search engines read the textual content of web pages.
- Therefore, SEO involves optimising the textual content of web pages so that search engines can read them.
- Finally, a major part of the SEO process involves trying to match the textual content of your site with the kinds of phrases people actually use when searching for the kinds of product or services you offer, so that the search engine thinks that your site is a relevant result for those phrases.
To put it another way, search engine optimisation attempts to improve your search engine visibility by improving your ranking for specific keywords or keyphrases. It does this, in part, by optimising key parts of your web pages so that the text in these pages employs the keyphrases people are likely to use when searching for your products or services.
Note: this does not mean that web pages should simply use the same phrases again and again. This is known as keyword spamming, and can result in your site being penalised by search engines. In later parts of this course, we will show you how to research, select, and deploy keywords in a safer, more effective and more ethical manner.
TASK 1:
Our first task is a very simple one aimed at offering you a chance to try out the above principles.
1) Navigate to the home page of a major search engine like Google, Yahoo, or MSN
2) Pretend that you are buying flowers for a partner online. Make a short list (no more than 3) of the keyphrases you might use to search for this product.
3) Enter each of your keyphrases in turn into the search engine.
4) For each keyphrase you enter, look at the leading results, and note the frequency of words that correspond with the phrases you used.
5) Ask yourself the following question: ‘why did the sites returned rank for my keyphrases’?
Note: There are other factors that affect the ranking of a site in search engine results, meaning that some sites that have all the ‘right’ keywords will rank much lower than other sites which mention the same keywords. We will explain these factors later on.
For more information about our Search Engine Optimisation Training Courses contact Syllabus or call +34 693 475 142.