Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is the practice of orienting a website to rank higher on a search engine results page (SERP) so that one receives more traffic. The aim is typically to rank on the first page of search results for search terms that mean the most to your target audience.

Content optimisation

Content optimization involves applying marketing best practices tied to your search engine optimisation (SEO) strategy. Communicating what your content is about to search engines is at the core of optimisation. The data that you supply makes this possible. The following are components of optimised content:

• Target keywords - These are the terms people use to search for online. When someone types words and phrases into a search bar, the results that come up are partially based on the target keywords in the content of those websites. Understanding what target keywords to include in your copy is a critical optimisation component.
  
• Meta descriptions and title tags - Every webpage has metadata embedded. This helps search engines understand what the page is about. Some of this information is what you see when a web page is displayed on the search engine results page (SERP), enticing readers to click through.
  
• Headers and subheaders - Web browsers and search engines understand content better when it's broken down into sections by headings and subheadings. Organised content also improves readability, which results in a better experience for your target audience.
  
• Alt text - If your content contains images, they need to be optimized with alt text. Alt text, or image tags, describes the image. It's also the text shown to users who are browsing with images off and, even more importantly, it's read aloud for people using screen readers for accessibility purposes. Search engines can use this image text to understand more about your content.
  
• Backlinks - Every time a site that's considered authoritative links to your content, it strengthens your content's authority. It also provides context about your content to search engines, and that increases your reach.
  
• Sitemap - A sitemap in XML format can list the important pages on your website that you want search engines to index.

Traffic analysis services

There are many analyisis services available for keyword and traffic research and they are mostly all the same - useless.

While offering insights, statistsics and recommendations on keywords to use, they offer the statistics on your keywords and strategy to your competitors.

So the best thing to do is, if you want to learn about keyword strategy, sign up for a demo account. Then close that account and block their bot's user-agent from accessing your web site.

Benefits

Most people click one of the first few search results, so higher rankings usually lead to more traffic. Unlike other channels, search traffic tends to be consistent and passive.

Search traffic is also free which is a big deal because ads can be expensive.

Disadvantages

The need to seed web pages for search rank has resulted in the publishing of gobbly gook. Now when users find a page through performing a web search on their topic, all they get is a description comprised of keywords that get repeated over and over again in as many ways possible.

Limitations

Google has played a large part in dictating what are the recommended principles of SEO.  But despite their motto being "do no evil" their motivation has always been the profit from ads. That ad market has inspired many to create websites for the sake of displaying ads and getting paid for them. Consequently those site operators will do anything to gain and maintain search rank... the more traffic the more hits on their ads.

But the SEO landscape shifts like desert sands and no-one really knows what works best or not. Search engines like Google have always refered to their ranking criteria as an algorithm and that its inner workings need to remain obscure to prevent it from being exploited.

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