Search Engine- the major traffic drivers
Using crawlers to search billions of entries on the World Wide Web, search engines index these sites, documents and pictures so that they can be recalled when a search query is made. This indexed information is then provided once a query is made on these search engines, thus providing solutions to the users’ problems and answers to their questions within milliseconds.
What is SEO?
Growing the visibility in organic, or rather, non-paid search engine results are the main focus of SEO marketing. Both the technical and creative elements within a site are taken into account when deciding whether the site meets the criteria for rakings, which then drive traffic and increase awareness of a site within search engines. From the way your pages are linked to the words you write (and even what images you use) are taken into account in SEO.
Why do you need SEO?
It is commercial search engine sites like Google, Bing and Yahoo! that drive the majority of web traffic. Even though you may get traffic from your social media sites, these search engines are the primary method of navigation for most Internet users.
Imagine your business is a shop that sells, say, the best cookies in the world (how did you know I like cookies?). However, your shop sits in a road full of bakeries, including big names like Greggs and Millie’s cookies, even though they don’t hold a candle to your sugary bites of goodness. To top it all off, your shop looks non-descript from the outside. How do you get your customer to come in?
You may have to employ a combination of strategies, such as:
- Painting your shop with bright (attractive) colours
- Having a big sign that says what you do.
- Leaving your door open (letting the freshly baked cookie smell to lure customers)
- Staff giving out freebie cookies on road.
Most of these tactics involve letting the customer know you’re there. It is exactly the same (minus the cookies) with your websites and Google. Google is the road, and your customers are the users. Providing targeted traffic, search engines show cookies to cookie lovers who type ‘cookie’. Now replace ‘cookie’ with your site’s product or service, and think how silly it would be if you chose to remain hidden from potential clients just because you are not visible to them. Although search engines are becoming more and more advanced in providing answers and doing advanced searches, they still need help from you, the site manager, to boost your page to relevant searches.
What can you do about it?
Although the search engine criteria for ranking sites are complex and masked, there are guides from Webmasters of each of these search engines to help your site be SEO ready: See Google and Bing webmaster guidelines to making your sites SEO ready.
Watch this space, we will add additional tips to help you in making your site SEO ready.
Still not convinced that being SEO ready is important? See these links below:
https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo/how-search-engines-operate
Also for some light entertainment have a look at OFEC’s vid on how to look after your website once it is built.