It’s a known fact that a website sitting in a higher position in a search engine is more noticeable and will get more clicks to it from the search engine results page (SERP).

Visitors to a company’s website are potential customers, so it’s now common practice for companies to implement search engine optimisation strategies to improve their rankings.

The search function behind a search engine is typically based on algorithmic calculations. Special programs (called spiders or crawlers) are used to find pages and make databases for search results.

These spiders or crawlers pull out links to other sites, pick up relevant keywords to the term being searched and how often these keywords occur on the page, and the structure of the site. Once the spider or crawler has registered a site and the data is sitting in the search engine’s repository, a website is said to be indexed.

The keywords a user might enter into a search engine’s search box is the key ingredient to SEO. Research must be undertaken to try and determine what keywords your potential customers might use when searching for your product or service.

Other factors that contribute to a successful SEO strategy include a website’s structure, content of the website, the design of the website and links in and out of a website. Further to this would be the inclusion of title tags, meta tags and image descriptions – all encrypted in the source of a website’s pages that can be picked up by a search engine’s crawler or spider.

Search engine optimisation needs to be continually monitored and updated, as the results, listings and algorithms of a search engine change periodically.

For more information about how to learn SEO, browse our article categories over on the left menu. If you have any SEO questions, you can register free at SEOhub and post your question to us.