Search Engine Optimisation

This process is all about making your website "search engine friendly". Search engines use bots to crawl the internet and "index" every page on every website they find. This essentially means they read a webpage and catalogue its contents into a database, if there are any links on the page, they will be followed and the that page is then catalogued. Obviously this is a much more complicated process than what is described here because the context of the words on the page is also considered, but this is far outside the scope of what is being detailed here.

Getting a high result on a search engine doesn't happen overnight and can't be forced to happen, but there are several techniques and systematic approaches that can be used to help it on its way.

The black art of optimisation

Most search engine bots work very differently in how they process the contents of a web page, but most use certain rules to help aide the cataloguing and results processing from a search query. These can briefly be listed in terms of the page title, headings, link text and meta information (information describing data).

You fancy taking a bet? Let's try a quick win/lose scenario. Say you open up your favourite search engine and searched for the term "British News". The chances that the BBC (or specifically the BBC News) webpage will be in the top 10 results is fairly high - try it now if you don't believe me! Now try searching for "Windows Operating System", odds on that Microsoft has a page or two in the top 10. This isn't just a coincidence, nor is it the result of witchcraft. It is, however, the result of optimisation and relevance, with a sprinkling of popularity.

When the bots from all those search engines you've just tried in order to find that one where BBC was not a top 10 and Microsoft was not even listed on the first page, let alone the top 10, they apply a weighting to certain words depending on where they are on the page. If the words "British" and "News" appear in the title of the page, then they are going to think that this page is likely to be relevant to what you want when you made the search for "British News". If they also appear in the main heading of the page then the relevance of the words on that page must be quite high, and if they are mentioned multiple times throughout the page, then this page must be about "British News" and therefore will be of interest to you if this is what you are searching for - which of course it was.

Similarly when you searched for "Windows Operating System", Microsoft had pages very high in the search results because they have alot of pages that are very focused on the Windows OS. Did you notice that Microsoft did not fair well on the search for "British News" yet the BBC did well for "Windows Operating System"? Although there are pages on Microsofts website that do have the words "British" and "News" on, it was not deemed very relevant to the search - it will be listed in the results somewhere. Now the BBC did well on the second search because they do have pages with all three of the words in "Windows Operating System" and they are in context and will be relevant to that page because the news articles listed are about the Windows operating system.

Getting up there on page 1 of Google

It has already been said that this can not be done over night, nor is it as simple as you may think. Due to the way that the bots and the indexing, and even the results processing, is done it can not be guarenteed you will ever have your page in the first 100 results for a generic search, but we can do our very best to get it as high as possible for a relevant search through optimisation techniques, time and good website design. This is all done through a good page structure at design time, a good coding practice and through general content structure - making sure the page is relevant and sensible.

We can create a whole tutorial on making you site efficient and optimised but its not as easy as following a "10 Step Guide to High Results Rankings", but if you do want to know more, then please contact us for more information on how we can help you.