Search Engine Optimisation

Improving your search engine rankings

As British author David Viney says in his book Get to the top on Google:

"Search engine optimisation (or SEO for short) is the art of getting your website to the top of the search rankings."

The basics of SEO can be fulfilled personally by website owners to improve search engine rankings, but it really is a specialised 'science' to cover all the aspects of getting to the top. It is achievable but will most likely require the services of a company that specialises in SEO techniques.

What is optimisation?
Optimisation involves creating your website content to align with the way search engines index and rank pages — usually to do with your choice of words or keywords. Keywords are words written on your page (and within the page code) that a search engine deems relevant to the page, which are in turn related to other pages on the web.

The Basics of SEO
Fulfilling the basics of SEO (which can be done by yourself) will have a profound effect on your rankings, such as optimising keywords relevant to your business within specific areas of your web page text:

• general text content
• page titles
• page headings
• alternative text (describing images)
  
• text within links
• and to a lesser degree page metadata

My BareBones CMS™ is built to allow the website owner to have an SEO capable website, but the expertise in achieving very high rankings requires the skills akin to those of researchers, writers and editors.

Further SEO techniques
In addition, a lot of the work required to reach the top in search engine results pages involves 'off-site' techniques that have little to do with your actual website. For example, ensuring that you have multiple links from other authoritive websites linking back to your website.

The importance of time
Another important aspect is time. Search engines like Google factor time into their 'algorithm' (the way they determine the ranking), to simulate the growth of a 'real world' business or entity. This means that it may take between 6 to 12 months for a website to start ranking highly, even if it displays the epitome of SEO techniques.

How to get more help
Should you desire to undertake a full SEO campaign, I can help you source a suitable third-party.

Additionally if you enter 'SEO techniques' into your favourite search engine you will find many providers of SEO services.