The Key to Ranking in Search Engines
“Hold on, I’ll Google it…” Admit it, you Google. It’s nothing to be ashamed of — everybody does it. That little phrase, “Google it!” was unheard of not so long ago and today it echoes around offices, classrooms and homes all over the world. It’s testament to the way the internet has established itself as an integral part of our daily lives.
There are an estimated 700 billion pages on the internet and we need help navigating through them. If the Yellow Pages were 700 billion pages thick, you’d welcome a little help navigating that too. Enter search engines. A search engine is the internet equivalent of the telephone’s ‘operator assistance’ service. You tell them what you want and they find it for you. Would you devote your time and resources to building the world’s best website if nobody ever found it? Understanding Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and knowing how to use it to your advantage is absolutely critical if you want your website to be seen.
Search engines are ‘crawler/spider’ or ‘spider-based’ directories which ‘crawl’ the web according to a request and return relevant results. The key role of SEO is to ensure that your business is visible in the results whenever a relevant search is made. Simply put, SEO is the process of ensuring that your target audience can find you online.
Valuable Content
Valuable content is what the search engines are looking for. If you want to perform well in search engines you should aim to create high quality, unique content. You should consider the keywords you wish to rank highly for when producing the content and use them in the page title, page heading and throughout the web page. Keywords are single words or phrases that are used within your website with the goal of appearing in the search engines for this term or phrase. For example, if you’re a hairdresser in Williamstown, you might nominate ‘Haircut Williamstown’ among your keywords.
