Once your site is up and running you’ll want to get as much targeted traffic as possible. In order for your site to perform well in search engines such as Google you’ll need to optimise the content and architecture of the site to its full potential.
The process known as Search Engine Optimisation or SEO should begin from the moment you start thinking about creating a site. Good SEO is not a magic art and doesn’t involve the use of any secret techniques; it’s mainly common sense and is simple good practice.
How Search Engines Work
In order to optimise your site you’ll need to understand how search engines work. This can be complicated but at a basic level the process is simple to comprehend.
Imagine the internet as a large filing cabinet with every single file representing a single site and the paper within those folders as web pages. Now imagine millions of folders containing millions of individual pages. You can imagine that finding the most relevant page for a given query could be difficult, particularly when those files are not organised or titled in any logical order. The internet is virtually the same, but on a much larger scale with millions of new pages being added each day.
Search engines use applications called robots or bots to crawl these folders, finding new files, indexing them and scoring each one for a range of terms in terms of relevance and importance. Good SEO is not cheating this system, it’s basically a means of helping these robots understand what your site is about and what words and terms are most significant.
How do search engines rank each web page?
Search engines evaluate your site relative to search terms so look at the keywords on your site, the site URL, the page title, headings on the page and so on in order to establish what your site is about. They will then look at the importance and authority of those terms by looking at the sites you link to, the sites that link to you, the amount of information on the site and so on.
On Site SEO and Off Site SEO
On Site SEO relates to the measure you can take in order to optimise the content of the site. Off Site SEO relates to how other sites link to yours and how you adopt good practice in terms of obtaining and optimising those links.
Useful Links
Straight from Google: What You Need to Know
Below is a video which features Google’s head of search quality, Matt Cutts, talking about website optimisation at WordCamp 2009, which is an annual conference for developers of the WordPress web publishing platform.
