Some Thoughts About SEO
James Miodonski 1st of February 2013
I get asked a lot of similar questions about SEO, so to help I put together this very brief and basic guide to search engines, websites and generally helping the two to get along nicely.
Relevance
Does your site have the answer I’m looking for?
Search engines such as Google will always try to serve up what is the most relevant website or page to a particular search term. So, for example, somebody searching online for ‘Rugby Union Fixtures’ it’s not surprising that the following sites rank highly:
- http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/rugby-union
- http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/rugby_union/fixtures/default.stm
There are a number of factors that contribute to getting a website or particular web page to perform well in the search engines, to name a few:
Accessibility
How easily or quickly a site be easily scanned and read by the search engines?
To help illustrate this, click here to see how a search engine, such as Google sees a well optimised website. You’ll notice that all the frills and images are completely stripped out, leaving only the text. However, it is still easy to see that this web page is specifically about Gardening.
Flash based websites = Bad SEO
Sites built in Flash are very difficult for search engines to read and decipher what information they hold, and more importantly, when to show these pages to someone searching for a particular word or phrase.
Support for Flash based sites is (thankfully) on the decline, helped in no small part by the popularity of Apple’s iPhone and iPad, neither of which support Flash.
In short – the easier you make it for search engines to access the content of your website, the greater the chances are of it being found by the right people.
Links
Links from other sites are a signal of trust
Inbound links coming in from other sites to your site all count as votes and help push it up the rankings. Generally speaking, the more votes (links) a site has the more trusted and correct it’s content is seen to be by the search engines. In turn, a vote (or link) from a strong, trusted site counts for more than that from a small, unknown site.
The better quality the site that links to you, the more valuable the link.
Want to know more? Drop us a line.
