What is Organic SEO ?

Organic Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the process of improving the volume of traffic to your website from the different search engines, through natural methods (rather than paid methods).  This means through a combination of :

• Naviagation and website structure
• Content
• Keywords and phrases
• Links

Effective SEO is about organising and presenting your website to search engines to ensure relevancy, creditably and accessibility.   Organic SEO techniques involve the use of keywords and phrases that are relevant to your organisation. The structure of your website is also and incredibly important aspect to your optimisation, shortly followed by linking to enable the search engines to index your web pages.

Links

Links are how the search engines find your website in the first place, and are also what rank your site.  Back links (links to your website from other websites) are very important, as are links away from your website, however a few reciprocal links are fine but too many can also be damaging.  The higher the ranking of website linking to your site, the better as it will improve your ranking.

How do Search Engines Work?

There are many different search engines, however the main ones are:  Google, Bing, Yahoo, MSN, Ask.

Search Engines

It is important to remember that these search engines are not human at all, and there is also a large difference between the way search engines read websites versus the way that humans do.  Search engines predominately are text-driven and look for text to see what a website is about, whereas humans like aesthetic pretty designs and flash that are often used by designers to make a site look good.  It is important to know that search engines cannot read images, flash movies, frames and also secure sites (https), so it may be worth checking your website to see if you have too many of these going on.

Search engines perform many activities in order to deliver results – crawling, indexing, processing relevancy and retrieving.   Search engines first of all have to crawl the web, then by using spiders/crawlers they will index the different pages as they come across them. Search engines also like “old” websites, sites that have been around for a long time, that have been updated and have good content.  Retrieving is the final stage in the process. Once the engine has found you it will then show the list in the searches.

What can we do for your website?

We will always analyse a website to look to see how it has been set up and how we could possibly improve it.  We look at a number of different simple techniques to help your website get found – as mentioned earlier:

Naviagation and website structure -  we look to see how your website is built (hopefully in WordPress). Google especially looks for a clear structure with clear titles and navigation.

Content – Good up to date content is not only good for your website, but also encourages visitors to engagae and stay longer.  Content can be a very large driver within the search engines.

Keywords and phrases – This is important to think about carefully. Whatever your keywords that you wish to be found under, these words must also appear throughout the content and structure of your site. Search engines will be able to find these easily if placed in prominent positions throughout.

Links – Links are paramount for being found. Links from other high-ranking websites to yours will always improve your website ranking, and it is equally important to have linking within your website and to external sites.  Linking makes it easier to get from one place to the next, making it more accessible.

If you have any questions about your website or would like more information on SEO, please get in touch.