SEO Waterford

SEO & Successful Search Engine Marketing can vastly improve your Search Engine Rankings and Get More Business for Your Website

"Whatever you may hear to the contrary, Good SEO is not an overnight result!"

SEO - Search Engine Optimisation is a painstaking method by which websites are adapted to comply with search engine criteria. It comes down to understanding exactly what Google and other search engines are looking for in the websites when they choose the results to display on screen in response to a particular search phrase. As Google is the search engine of choice for at least 75% of all web surfers, it is a continual effort for websites to comply with their ranking criteria.

Incredibly complicated, and very secret mathematical formulae, are involved on the part of Google. Each page on every website is analysed for content, links, tags, popularity, average time visitors stay on the page, where they go to when they leave the page, and various other details. This analysis allows Google to systematically choose the pages to display that are most likely to be of benefit to the person who is searching.

In order to get Google to rank a particular website high up on the search page results, various things must be done to get Google to see the website as both an extremely popular and informative site. This is the process is called SEO and is an essential part of the search engine marketing process.  Pages within the website are set to target as the result for particular search phrases. Depending on how specific the keywords are and how well the content matches with that particular topic, individual pages within the website rank rank for different search terms. It is quite possible to have the home page appear relatively low on the Google rankings, but one or two main content pages rank highly for their particular topic.

Any new website, or one that has not been performing well, will have to undergo at least some SEO in order to be found on searches. There are some aspects of SEO that are relatively straight forward, such as improving content, title tags, image and heading tags and improving linking within the site for increased site manouvreability. 

As the site moves up the search engine rankings it will be competing against well established sites that have already proved their value. In competitive niches, the high ranking sites that appear on the first page of the search results are likely to have had some or a lot of SEO done to them in order for them to maintain their rankings. Even with the best SEO, it can take months for the rankings to improve, as the site has to be tested and retested to see whether visitors stay on the site or click in and leave quickly. Search engines are constantly tweaking their systems and criteria in order to provide the best results. so the website and the SEO must also be continually updated,

Essentially, what this means is that a small, new website does have a chance to move up Google rankings relatively quickly if it is competing in a small marketplace, with little competition who have not paid much attention to their SEO. However, in competitive fields, where there are big companies with big budgets, the chances of getting onto the first page of search results are much slimmer, even with a great deal of SEO. In these cases it is often a good idea to start by optimising the website pages for the less common keyword searches, in an effort to get the site moved up the rankings. A good performance wil register with the search engines and they can start moving the site up the rankings for the more popular, competitive search terms.

True SEO will can go on for months and years, and is a constantly evolving process to try to outrank the competition. SEO must be looked upon as a long term investment in marketing, but is usually well worth all the time, effort and expense involved, as there are very few other opportunities in business to reach such a large and targeted market.

Denis Hegarty
Success Online Search Engine Marketing