With so many people discovering the benefits of SEO, the word is spreading quickly about best practice methods, how much it costs, plus how and why it works. So what is SEO, and what are the basics? In this article we explore the fundamentals of what SEO is, and describe the most important function of this exciting marketing tool- being an informative authority within your market place.

SEO is the process of improving the traffic of a websites (one set URL, a sub domain, or a landing page) in the search providers results.

SEO includes working to improve the rank of a particular target page for Google, Bing, Yahoo and other major engines. The reason why SEO works is that it helps the robots see which particular sites can be more beneficial for the people who are looking for a particular product or provider of services.

In order to appear in the top places of the rankings, it is a requirement that the content used should be unique and detailed. The well known engines from where one can get detailed and updated information are mainly Google and Yahoo. SEO is carried out differently on every website, which relates to different activities, organisation, industries and other faculties. The methods used to implement this process include getting indexed, prevention of crawling and improving prominence with various techniques.

In the process of getting indexed, a page on a website will then appear in the results and be ranked in order of desirability. This is determined by an algorithm, which essentially captures data and then makes a choice where each result (often there are millions) will be placed. SEO is the process of adopting the likes and dislikes of the algorithms, and then improving a website accordingly.

The prevention of crawling [in certain instances], is mainly done to avoid unnecessary content and files in the SERP indexes. In order to avoid unnecessary content in indexed results, the files of robot.txt type are exempted. This can be an important factor in successful SEO, stopping too many hyper-links reducing another pages link popularity (by way of low quality score). Also to stop duplicated text (often industry news, or repetition of law for example) being found. The reason for this is that duplicated content is considered poor SEO practice.

For improving the prominence of rankings, certain keywords which are used as links are then cross linked between the pages within the website directory. The keywords or the keyword phrase which is included in the contents of the text, are added in such a way that these keywords match the search queries made by people.

The addition and use of more keywords (within reason) helps to improve the traffic of the website, as more people would access the particular website in order to know certain types of information. You can only achieve top rankings when you have acquired a status as a genuine and worthy provider of information on any given topic (in the eyes of the robots).

Moving on with the subject of being ‘more important than another website’ for a query string, the authority status starts to become more obvious as the way to stand out. Unlike the browsing public, the robots that trawl the web caching data on every page possible don’t actually see the fancy style sheets and pretty, smart images. SEO companies take this into account.

So how do they decide who goes top and who goes last? Well, when they find a page, there are a huge number of influences that help them build a picture of the importance of the page. It starts with the basic Meta information, which shouts out a theme. Then there will be text describing the theme to the content.

Any images should have a description attached to them (alt tags). The page may have other websites linking to it, and the anchor text that links in will give even more clues to what message is being given.

SEO starts with keyword research, and then the whole process is 100% committed to working on providing a powerful base of information on one or a number of topics. This topic is your market place, and sticking to this idea will help the SEO in the long term. It will also help your customers (and staff) build knowledge.

After the pure organic SEO, it’s then time to tackle social media marketing! This is a simple example of how time consuming SEO can be, even before you look at the social networks.

We hope this article helps to prove that companies like Google are not making it hard for you to achieve great sales online. They are simply making it beneficial to fill your site with fresh and unique content. It’s their way of stopping the web being filled with poor user-content, and giving everyone a better experience online. That’s something we all want to see. Contact IM3 for a proposal today.