Basic Search Engine Optimisation Part1
by: Paul Cottam
For those of you new to SEO you will find that most experienced web site designers will have a good basic knowledge of how to optimize your site in the initial building process to help your rankings in the search engines and will work with this into the design from the start of the build
Sometimes this can effect the overall look of the site, often a web designer will be asked to produce a highly visual flash introduction page. Your web developer will probably advise you against this for SEO reasons, but as you are the paying client you will want you site to look visually exciting and some site owners often ignore their web designers advice and rightly think “after all I am paying the bill and so I will have what I want”
Well you are correct but any web developer worth his fee will tell you that although the flash intro looks great and he will charge lots of money for developing it, search engines cannot spider through flash and the page would have a greatly improved chance of scoring higher in the search engine rankings if it had lots of quality relevant content on it
This means content will often score over stunning eye catching designs unless you are not concerned over surfers finding your site from Google, Yahoo and Msn search engines, which leads me into my next question
Which search engines are important?
Well that’s generally an easy one to answer, Google is definitely the No1 search engine in the world at the present time with Yahoo second and MSN in third place, the relevant percentages are listed below
Google 42.7%
Yahoo 28%
Msn 13.2%
Aol 7.6%
Ask 5.9%
Others 2.6%
Source of these statistic is comscore March 2006
As you can see a large percentage of the market is taken up by the big 3 and so trying to improve your search engine optimization for the big 3 will bring in more surfers!! And as Google has the largest share then it pays to concentrate on your Google search engine rankings
The trend from March 2005 to March 2006 has been that Google has increased its share of the search market by taking market share from all the other search engine with the exception of Ask which has had a small growth
So we can tell from this information that it is obvious that Google is No1 but also Yahoo and Msn are also important, sometimes it can be difficult to achieve good rankings in Google but you may be successful with Yahoo or Msn , a good ranking in any of these search engines will brink you plenty of traffic
At this current time many SEO specialists are studying the results you now get from a search using Google as there results are no longer as good as they once were in my opinion and the opinion of few other SEO’s and many spammy directory listings are starting to score high on Google, making some users including myself start to turn to other search engines
Before we discuss more Search Engine Optimisation techniques we will discuss how exactly does a search engine find your site
Most search engines will find your site without you having to do anything, in the old days (a few years ago) you would have to had hand submit your web site address etc to all the search engines individually
You can still submit your url to Google, but the submission page is hard to find in fact its almost as if Google dose not want you to submit web site address any more , You can only submit your site to Yahoo if you pay a fee and I have never been able to find the submit page for Msn
Even if you do not submit your site to any of the above search engines, eventually they will find your site on there own , each search engine has its own spider , this is a piece of specialist software that trails through the internet looking for content
About The Author
Paul Cottam runs Affordable Webdesign and specialises in Inexpensive Web Media Solutions and Search Engine Optimisation
View their website at:
http://www.affordable-webdesign.net
