Search Engine Optimization
Internet search has become one of the most vital areas of online business, and an entire industry has sprung up around optimizing websites to achieve the best search results possible. This is vital because a high proportion of online sales for any business comes from customers who find the website through an Internet search. Customers who search for a particular phrase - say, "second-hand books" - will usually click on links that appear on the first page of their search results, and therefore achieving a front page result is the goal of SEO.
Google Ranking
Google is the best example to discuss because it is now the most important search engine. When you search for a phrase in Google, e.g. "second-hand books", the search results that Google returns are ranked according to how important Google thinks each site is for that particular search phrase. It calculates this ranking through an algorithm which they do not make public but which has been roughly worked out based on what sites achieve high rankings, and what methods they used to achieve them.
Most Internet search occurs through users searching for keywords or keyphrases, and therefore when optimizing a site it is vital for the business to select appropriate keywords. Highly competitive and desirable words or phrases such as "web design" or "software" will generally be extremely difficult to achieve high rankings for. Extremely specific phrases such as "scented brown second-hand Irish books" can be practically guaranteed a top ranking, but it will be very rare for anyone actually to search for that exact phrase. Therefore, a happy medium should be struck between general and specific. A reasonable way of arriving at good keywords for your site is to examine competing sites.
There are various factors involved in optimizing the site for those keywords, once they have been chosen. Google tries to assess the relevance and importance of each page it indexes, and it is quite intelligent in its ways of doing this. At first glance it might seem that placing your keyphrase on your front page 5,000 times would be sure to land you a top result, but in fact this will demote your site in their eyes. Google attaches importance to readable and relevant URLs, relevant placement of keyphrases in your headings, and use of the keyphrases in links both on your site and those linking to you. It reads both the visible and hidden content of each page.
Another aspect of the Google ranking is that it assigns importance to your site based on how many other sites link to you, and how relevant they are to your keywords. This becomes an important part of maintaining a search engine listing - exchanging links with relevant sites and seeking out new listings.
Google also checks how often your pages are updated - important sites are regularly updated and Google therefore decides it needs to index them more regularly. A regular search engine maintenance contract will include automatically updating your pages every month even if they have had no actual content changes.
It takes time for your site to be indexed once it has been submitted to Google - sometimes days, sometimes months, depending on how well it has been designed. Often only the front page will be indexed, although the sooner you can get other people linking to you, the sooner further pages on your site will be indexed. Once you have been indexed, it may take some time for you to achieve a high ranking, as Google gradually detects other sites linking to you.
Professional SEO Services
There are actually so many factors involved in achieving high search rankings for clients that there are many companies out there who do nothing else. PEC Consulting offers the full range of services in this area: the initial optimization of your site's pages; the ongoing submission to search engines, directories and sites which may exchange links; and the detailed analysis of your statistics that help you to streamline your site's content over time and increase sales. You may find yourself surprised when you examine the statistics for your site and find that only 3 people have discovered you last month through searching for "Irish second-hand books", but 50 have discovered you through searching for memorabilia from your home town, based on Google indexing a brief article on your website. Information like this is vital and can often cause a business to refocus its marketing or alter the prominence of certain elements of their site.
Our most basic offering is simply to prepare your site's content to a reasonable level for your selected keywords, to submit you once to Google, Yahoo, MSN and a few other search engines and directories, and leave the site to sink or swim after that.
Our next level would be to optimize the site to a good level (analyzing competing sites, restructuring content to be as "Google-attractive" as possible) and spend 1 hour per month refreshing your submission to the main search engines and seeking out new listings for your site.
Finally, we can optimize your site to the highest possible level, which may involve the creation of informational articles to attract search engine traffic, in-depth analysis of site traffic, intensive search for appropriate links and listings (several hours per month), submission to a far greater number of search engines, and purchasing of paid advertising or paid inclusion in high-traffic directory sites. Once you have achieved a top ranking or #1 ranking then the monthly work would tail off as less work is required to maintain the listing than to achieve it in the first place.
There is a wealth of information available on the web on this topic, and we have tried only to distil the main points here to give our customers an idea of what their money may pay for in this area. A good thing to bear in mind is that it usually does not take very many sales for an online business to recoup what they have invested in driving more traffic to their site, and that increase in search ranking and traffic is quite durable once established.