The web is a massive source of information. All this information requires online tools that help to organise and easily retrieve information online. These online tools, referred to as search engines, are extensively used by users worldwide. When a user searches for something, the most relevant results come first. The most popular search engines to date are Google, Bing, and Yahoo. Yahoo’s Search is now powered by Bing.

Search engines results page contains two types of listings: the organic listings and the paid listings. Paid listings would normally appear on top and on the right hand side of the search engine results page (abbreviated as SERP). On major search engines, these advertisements are similar to the organic listings but are visually differentiated and labelled. Unlike paid listings, organic listings do not require the user to pay to be visible under the organic section. However, your site must meet certain criteria to be able to rank above the rest.

Search engine optimisation (SEO) affects the organic listings which is the middle and most popular column on a SERP. Organic listings would normally add up to 10 listings. This means that when clicking on the next page, you can see the next 10 listings and so forth. SEO is all about increasing your site rankings on search engines and achieve significant business goals. The more search engine friendly your website is, the higher the ranking for those specific keywords.

Users tend to click more often on the top search results since these would be highly relevant to their search query. Acquiring your position on the top search results for specific queries would thus result in a boost of traffic and thereby achieving your desired business goals.

Given that the users would already be searching for your products and services, ending on your site from search engines increases the likelihood of making an action on your site. Your website must ultimately engage them enough to turn these potential customers to actually being your customers.

Is it easy to rank in top search results?

It depends. The amount of optimisation required to rank for the top position depends on the keyword’s competition on the search engine. The basis of search engine ranking factors are in fact two: relevance and popularity. If a user performs a search on Google, the contents of the websites returned must be relevant to the search query. Meanwhile, popularity measures the level of importance of the page based on the total number of links pointing to it. To keep it simple, a search engine will see every link pointing to your site as a vote. The more votes a page has, the higher it will rank on search engines.

The ordering of search results is very complex. Search engine ranking technology has evolved throughout the years making SEO much harder than before. Surrounding the two critical factors mentioned above are far more signals that help search engines return relevant results. Google states that they use more than 200 signals including several computer algorithms. Every particular aspect surrounding your website will affect rankings such as domain, web hosting, site structure, HTML code of the page, page titles, content, links and much more.

Keep in mind that when you are performing SEO, you cannot ‘trick’ search engines using sneaky techniques such as repeating extensively your keywords on the page to increase content relevancy, it will do more harm than good. Google in particular identifies spam and your site can end up penalised or even excluded from the search results. All major search engines have strict guidelines for SEO and one must clearly abide to these rules, at least without running the risk of having your site penalised.

SEO can bring huge opportunities for your business. Even better, with tracking installed you can monitor several metrics on your site such as visitors, page views and traffic sources along with other valuable data. Let’s not also forget about tracking goals on your site such as a purchase, lead or a signup.

www.alert.com.mt

Mr Bugeja is an SEO consultant at Alert, a local web-development company.

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