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Search Engine Optimisation – What You Need to Know

August 27, 2012 | Debra Barber

The growth of the Internet has definitely brought up the need for Search Engine Optimisation – a term that, although not new, seems to be talked about everywhere.

Search Engine Optimisation is required on your website as a means of driving traffic to your website using relative keywords or key phrases targeted to your consumers and the products or services you offer. There are a few ways that Search Engine Optimisation helps to get your website noticed.

These are:

1. Indexing
   Search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing use what are known as crawlers or bots that find pages according to the users search term entered into their Search Engine. Search Engines offer Pay-Per-Click and also flat rate advertising if you would like to get your website on paid results in their SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). Having a page in the SERPs isn’t really great if you’re on page 14 or really anywhere other than page 1. This is where indexing comes in. The crawlers or bots will look over the site, even though sometimes excluding certain ages, and once they do crawl a page, it will be indexed in search engines so that when someone submits a search, they may not land on your page. TIP: ensure your information is live on your site before you submit your URL to search engines.
2. Exclusion
   We have referred to crawlers or bots above and we refer to them again here. Crawlers or bots can look for content they want to be placed in SERPs as well as looking for content they want excluded from SERPs. To exclude a page, the crawlers are given instructions NOT to visit certain types of files or directories. TIP: you have to be certain that the type of content you have is suitable or else you run the risk of being excluded from SERPs no matter how unique and plentiful your content is, you will never get up the rankings of the search engines.
3. Elevating reputation
   You can elevate your reputation using a variety of techniques one is known as Cross Linking. Cross Linking allows you to link the pages of your website so you can have more links to your website which increases your websites visibility. You can also add keywords and key phrases to your Meta Data (meta tag and meta description). There are numerous methods that can be used If you have more than one URL with similar names; you may link them in such a way that the accumulated traffic you receive from both can be used to push traffic to one elevating your reputation.
4. Black Hat techniques vs. White Hat techniques
   These two phrases describe the types of techniques used by Search Engine Optimisation firms. A good firm will only use White Hat techniques as we do. White Hat techniques really are the only way to do SEO as they follow all the rules stipulated by Search Engines (i.e. Google, Yahoo, and Bing). Black Hat techniques are not recommended and by using these techniques you run the risk of your site being banned from SERPs. These techniques include cloaking where the website would give crawlers a page and give a human another page instead, hiding the text by placing it outside the visible screen or cloaking it by making the text the same colour as the background.

This information should give you some tips and information on Search Engine Optimisation; how it is done, how it should be done and the benefits of applying White Hat techniques and doing things the correct way. Also, remember to be aware of the implications of doing Search Engine Optimisation improperly.

 TIP: beware of going for the cheapest quotes for SEO as it is likely the cheaper the service, the more likely it is that the firm is using black hat techniques.

Have you been using SEO techniques that have worked really well for your business? Leave a comment so other business women reading our blog can also learn from your skills.