How effective is Search Engine Optimisation?

This is a question I am often asked. The only answer is very effective when done properly.

You see in order for a search engine to rank your site it has to be able to read your content. Imagine giving a CD to a book reviewer and asking him to read it. If he did not have a cd player what could he do? This is the same for websites. If you have a very fancy flash only website search engines can not read the flash content. Sure the site looks great but the search engines will usually say fine and move on.

So you need content on your site. It needs to be relevent for the market you are targetting. This makes sense if you think about it. Imagine selling a book with no relevent content in it. You go looking for a bookshop that specilises in Spanish Language books but you find it is in fact a general bookshop. You’re going to be disappointed, feel you’ve wasted time and be annoyed. Will you recommend this bookstore? No because you were for want of a better word lied to in it’s relevence and content. The same goes for your website. If a user finds or a search engine finds that it is not relevent to what they were looking for you soon get a bad name and won’t get good rankings.

The idea with your site is to find a niche and build your content for those people. Search engines like nice targetted sites. For example a site about renting or selling property works better if it focuses on just that rather than selling cars and caravans and boats. This is often refered to as a Silo.

The more focused your site is the better.

Remember it’s better to get 20 focused visitors to your website a day then 200 tyre kickers

With regard to the SEO element you need to provide relevent keywords and content. If you’re selling houses in Dublin, name your main pages houses-for-sale-dublin.html – this ensures that the viewer of the page can see what the page is about and can help on search engine ranking. Compare this to newpage3.htm – what’s that about?

Use your meta keywords and description and make them relevent – don’t put in keywords about selling boats selling cars etc.

Remember it’s all about content and relevance.

Take care and more later

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