Understanding Search Engine Optimisation & Long Term Search Engine Ranking Strategies
Terminology key:
| Index / indexing |
A search engine ‘reading’ your website and storing that information in its databases, ready for use in its listings. |
| Listings |
A search engine publishing your website in its returned search results for relevant search criteria. |
| Rankings |
Your websites position in the listings for relevant search criteria. |
In terms of improving your websites performance in the search engine rankings, there is no quick fix unfortunately. Building a strong position is a long term, and ongoing, process. There is a difference between a website establishing its relevance to certain search criteria, and a website being considered to be of a high importance within that criteria compared to its competition.
Search engine optimisation work performed on a website establishes firstly, which search criteria the site is relevant to – and secondly, makes the information contained in the site as accessible to the search engines as possible via a number of coding techniques. Implementing these techniques correctly will make it easier for the search engines to index all the information on your site, meaning it will be listed under the correct search criteria. SEO work will not directly improve search engine rankings, although optimising a sites content for specific search criteria using the correct SEO techniques will enable the search engines to index your sites content much more effectively. The site is therefore more likely to be listed for the search terms it is optimised for.
Search engines rank your website according to two other criteria, which work hand in hand. Firstly, incoming links to your website from other high quality websites. The more links your website receives, the more it is perceived to be a useful resource and is therefore ranked higher. Please note that quantity is no substitute for quality here, incoming links should come from industry related established websites. The more important the company is that is linking to you, again the more your site is perceived to be a useful resource to bigger and longer established companies – and hence you get ranked higher. Conversely, if you have large numbers of incoming links from unrelated poor resources (link farms / spam directories and forums etc…) you will be penalised for attempting to artificially inflate your rankings. As an example if a web design company had an incoming link from the Microsoft and Apple websites, they would be ranked higher than if they had twenty or thirty links from non-related smaller businesses whose websites were not considered to be as important or relevant. The second criteria for establishing your ranking is traffic - how many people visit your website. If you have a large amount of traffic your site is perceived to be a popular and successful resource and is therefore ranked higher to make it more visible to other users who might find it useful. The reason the two criteria work together so closely is that incoming links provide you with more direct traffic from other sites, and if you are higher up the rankings more related businesses find you and will want to link to you. This tends to lead to a ‘snowball’ effect for the more successful websites, which in some cases can take years to establish.
Article copyright WEBcouk 2008
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