What is Search Engine Optimisation? An Overview
Wed, 31st March, 2010 - Posted by
Guest post by Nichola Stott, The Media Flow.
The Guide to Search Engine Optimisation for Small Businesses – Part 1.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the practise of ensuring that your site is built, and marketed in such a way; that search engine crawlers can more easily identify and rank your site, for the type of content and business you offer.
Why is this important?
Search is one of the most common online activities, and often the greatest driver of visits to any online business or blog, providing your site is optimised correctly. In fact the global search market place drives more than 100 billion searches a month, and as a region Europe drives the highest percentage of these global searches, according to leading global digital measurement company comScore.
During the course of this five part series, we are going to be looking at the fundamental areas of search engine optimisation, which are technical considerations; site building considerations, and site marketing considerations. In the final fifth edition, we will be looking at myths and common misconceptions, including practises to avoid, as well as credible sources for further reading.
In today’s post we’re going to look at the current state of the search engine market place and the very first steps…
Historically there used to be a number of different search engines, including Alta Vista, Alltheweb, Ask Jeeves, Hotbot etc. As Google began to rise in popularity and search became an extremely profitable business, due to the sponsored listings served with natural listings there was a lot of acquisition and consolidation in the marketplace. Yahoo! bought Alta Vista and Alltheweb, a number of partnerships were struck whereby the most popular search providers now power the search engine on popular online destinations, e.g. Google provides the search on AOL.
Today in the UK, Google has around 91% of the search engine market share, Bing and Yahoo! have around 3.5% each, Ask has 1% and the remainder is made up of a number of smaller search engines combined.
What this means is that to work smartly, any small to medium online business should focus on ranking well in Google first and foremost. Additionally, tracking your appearance in search engines should be limited to Google, Yahoo! and Bing.
As a first step, you should ensure that you register for Google analytics, to help you monitor and track all traffic to your site, so that you can chart your progress. Secondly, you should also verify your site in Webmaster tools, which will help you to analyse how Google sees your site and also identify any errors.
Both of these Google tools are freely available to help you monitor and improve your traffic and website. We will be looking in more detail at these and other freely available tools, to assist you in optimising your website, throughout this series.
About the author: Nichola Stott is a highly regarded search and social media professional with over a decade of experience in online communications. Nichola is director and co-founder of theMediaFlow, a search and social media agency; and is a regular conference speaker and contributor to online industry media including Econsultancy, SEO Chicks and State of Search. You can contact Nichola on linkedin or twitter.
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One Response to “What is Search Engine Optimisation? An Overview”
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oh cool, this information is really useful and definately is comment worthy! I’ll see if I can try to use some of this information for my own blog. Thanks!