What Is SEO Anyway?
Search Engine Optimisation, more often referred to as SEO, is simply the practice of enhancing certain elements of your website specifically with the intention of increasing rankings within Google and other major search engines for the keywords and search terms relating t your website’s content. But why is it such a big deal?
Well, search engines such as Google and Yahoo use bots known as crawlers or spiders to scour the web. It’s these crawlers that return the information that features in the search engine. Optimisation on your website itself involves making it clear to these search engine bots, essentially, exactly what keywords and phrases your site is the most relevant for, without hampering the human user experience.
We love the Internet. Over recent years the number of people using it to make purchases or enquire about potential purchases has risen rapidly. We can buy anything online from car insurance, to food and clothing!
In fact, in 2009 just in the UK, consumers amassed a total online shopping spend of 38 billion, predicted by Forrester Research to rise to 56 billion by 2014. That’s a huge online spend, especially when you consider the fact that the UK was in the grip of a recession from which it did not officially emerge until the end of the year.
As the Internet becomes ever more impossible to ignore, businesses are switching on to the fact that simply having a website will not suffice as an Internet marketing strategy. Given the fact that so many millions of us shop online and that a high proportion of such searches for products and services start with a search engine, SEO has become an effective means of enhancing your site’s visibility to the consumers specifically seeking out your products.