Simply, what is SEO?

Search engine optimization is an area of website design and online marketing that is loaded full of acronyms and terminology that are simply not easy to understand if you don't keep in the know. This obviously suits some pompous SEO experts as they get the opportunity to procrastinate whilst explaining within their own importance about topics their audience probably isn't actually interested in! But not all SEO experts are like this, indeed many people who work within the SEO field can find the secrecy that revolves around the subject quite laborious and the constant need to justify the importance of SEO plainly put 'a pain in the bum!!'.

Rant over!
So, I am going to touch on what I understand to be some of the basics and this will hopefully make the subject a bit easier to understand.

The main purpose I feel of SEO is to get a website found when someone searches for it. SEO takes place in two major parts, it takes place within the website and it takes place within the world wide web:

SEO Within a Website

In order for a website to be found when someone searches for it it has to meet certain criteria that is set by each search engine (Google, Bing, Yahoo etc). As a general rule if you use valid interesting and engaging content your site will get picked up by search engines and begin to move up the rankings.

The coding or language used behind the scenes on your website is very important too. If you use the most up to date code on your website then you are more likely to gain higher rankings and listings then a website using out dated code.

For example HTML 5 uses the most up to date HTML code and it takes into consideration older browser versions, allowing simplified or alternative versions of content to be displayed if the original content is not compatible (with the use of a boiler plate etc *sorry bit of tech speak!!*).

So this is probably the best html code to use if building a website today. But this is not enough, if you want the website to move up the listings or page rankings then your content must be good, keep the reader or website user engaged (or at least on the page) and the content needs to be updated on a regular basis. This is why many websites that have largely static content will include a blog page to ensure the content is updated etc.

SEO Within the World Wide Web

This type of SEO is when a website is marketed or advertised to the wider audience in order for it to be noticed (or viewed) more. This will can rapidly increase your page listings but is by no means a long term solution. If you start to get a website up the page rankings and it immediately drops in the rankings when you stop promoting it then you have to ask why? Is it the content, code or the topic area?
Care must be taken when promoting a website this way, over promoting will damage a websites reputation and it may be permanent damage. Under promoting of a site may mean it won't get listed as high as your competitors and it will be losing potential exposure.
For example when I finish writing this blog I may post it onto face book, twitter or google plus, ideally posting it on these sites across a number of days but either way gaining further exposure for the blog. This will get a few genuine people viewing it and hopefully they will re-post and advertise the blog further, if the like what they are reading then they will return to my blog and so on. This will hopefully have a 'snow ball' effect and my blog about SEO will end up ranking at the top of page one on all search engines when someone searches what is SEO!!!!
However if I was to post my blog across every social networking site, every hour for a week then it would have detrimental effects as search engines are wise to over pushing or advertising your content, particularly if your advertising the same thing over and over (known as duplicate content). This could damage your websites reputation or even get your website banned from some search engines. It will also result in people ignoring your posts and an increase in 'bounce rate' (people that visit your websites page, don't like what they see, and leave straight away!). If your bounce rate increases then search engines think the content on a website isn't what the the search term is looking for, resulting in a loss of page ranking.

Hopefully this installment hasn't blown your mind! After all there is a good reason SEO experts are called experts! This is just the tip of the iceberg and I will continue more in depth SEO blogs in the future. If you are itching to find out more then check out our web crawler and website indexing blogs found on the side of this one -->

Or if you would like Above Website Design to do Some SEO work to boost your websites potential then go to our main website and contact us. www.abovewebsitedesign.co.uk