SEO - Search Engine Optimisation

SEO - Search Engine Optimisation is the practice of optimising a website to best reach a target audience through searches made on search engines. The content, text and coding of website can have a huge influence on how high the website will rank on search engines.

 

SEO has many facets including:

Optimum Keywords

The text or "copy" of the website should contain the keywords that people are most likely to use to search for it using search engines. This requires keyword research.

Natural Wording

The text should read naturally and not be  crammed full of repeated keywords which search engines could automatically consider as anti-competitive and then deduct points from the websites ranking.

Optimum Arrangement of Keywords

As far as possible keyword positioning should be prioritised with the most important keywords in the first paragraph or two. Placing keywords in titles, headings and image captions can help.

Relevance

The information on each page should be as relevant as possible to the search terms used to find the page.

Optimum Coding

Optimum coding (programming) practices will make keywords as accessible as possible to search engines which index the text on a page. Furthermore faster websites may rank higher on search engines, especially when searches are made on mobile devices.

Analytics

Tools such as Google analytics can help clients and developers to analyse the traffic to each page on a website and details such as: what percentage of visitors go beyond the front page; the geographical areas of visitors; which platforms visitors are using and other demographics. This details can all affect how high a website will rank on search engines. The analysis can indicate where improvements need to be made in the SEO.