Three Steps to SEO Success

If you run a business with a web presence, you have probably noticed the web get more and more congested over time. These days there are so many sites competing for the attention of web users that getting noticed amid the throngs can be extremely challenging.

Thankfully, there is an entire industry dedicated to helping businesses get themselves noticed on the World Wide Web. This is widely known as the search engine optimisation, or SEO, industry, although this title is something of a misnomer (nobody who works in the field optimises search engines).

Because search engines guard the secrets of their algorithms very closely, life can become difficult for well-meaning webmasters who just want their websites to appear closer to the top of the organic search results. Although the major search engines are getting better at informing the community when they change their ranking algorithms (most notably Google), SEO practitioners must engage in a constant process of rigorous testing to determine the reasons for any ranking reshuffle.

Like search engine operators, SEO professionals tend to guard their most effective techniques carefully. Low barriers to entry in this industry mean there is always a risk that a new competitor will be able to reproduce the work of a successful enterprise. However, there are some commonly recognised steps that any business can take to ensure it is easily visible within search engine indexes.

First and foremost, the importance of targeting specific keywords with content cannot be overstated. Search engines are not telepathic (yet!) so they rely on certain indicators to determine the relevance and value of content on the web. If the keywords you are targeting do not appear in the body text of your content, search engines must work harder to determine its relevance to search queries, and are less likely to afford you a prominent position in their results pages.

Second, ensuring that all the pages on your website are interlinked can help your website achieve better rankings in Google. It makes life easier for search engine web crawlers, which can only be a good thing, and it also ensures that if one particular piece of content on your website becomes popular, that popularity will be shared among the other pages on your site. This means that parts of your site that are designed to attract attention (e.g. the company blog) can add value to parts of your site that are intended to bring readers along the conversion funnel (e.g. the service description).

Third, you can build relationships with other websites that are relevant to your own. This process is commonly known as 'link building'. Inbound links pass value to your website, so increasing the number of inbound links to your site is a great way to boost your prominence within search engine results pages. However, not all links are created equal, and those that come from authoritative websites will always be worth more than those that come from backwater blogs. Above all, make sure that your approach to link building is an ethical one - attempting to 'game the system' will never go down well with search engine operators and could result in a penalty.