Digital Internet Marketing - Hints and Tips

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Simplified

In any Digital Internet Marketing Plan, optimizing business websites for search engines is a great way for business owners to attract traffic to their websites. Here at WSI, after working with SEO for many years, we have learned to appreciate the value of SEO and it is without doubt the main strategy that we advise business owners to focus on, regardless of industry. The important thing to remember is that SEO is a long term strategy as it does not happen overnight. In fact, it can take many months to succeed with SEO and therefore it should be the main component in any digital internet marketing plan.

For many business owners SEO can be quite complex and difficult to understand. The aim of this article is to explain what SEO is and how to implement it into your business strategy.

How the Search Engines read your website

Firstly, let’s look at how the search engines see the web so that we can understand how they work. Most of the popular search engines (Google, Yahoo, BING) have software programs called “web crawlers” or “bots”. These programs “crawl” the internet visiting websites, reading what they find and indexing their findings into huge index databases. Depending on the popularity of a website and update frequency, these crawlers can come back several times a day to check for updates.

The main search engine providers are constantly updating their technology and have built in a level of “intelligence” via some very complex algorithms which dictate how these web crawlers react when they come across websites. Basically, they use a complex set of algorithms and calculations to understand what your website is all about. If the web crawler sees words like “handmade floor tiles”, “studio” and “our clients” they are programmed to assume this is a floor tile business website.

The crawlers can’t see images, they can’t watch videos and they can’t hear sounds. So when Mr. Google Bot visits your site all the fancy pictures, movies, flash animations and sounds are invisible. All the bots see is plain old boring text and that’s why it is so important to make it easy for Google or other search engines to read your site. Google has nearly 80%-90% of all web traffic so focus on Google

Therefore, if you use web design techniques to create these type of effects (very pleasing for human visitors) you must ensure that all visual and sound effects are removed, leaving nothing but the text and that people will still be able to understand what your website is all about.

Relevancy is what all search engines value and their main objective is to provide their users with the most relevant results possible when they search for whatever they are looking for. So, as part of your digital internet planning, if you want to come up on the first page when people search for “handmade floor tiles” in your area, it is important to make sure Google knows you’re relevant for it.