How Is Your Business Approaching SEO?

SEO, the initials for Search Engine Optimization, is a set of techniques meant to increase a site's exposure by making it more search engine friendly. Although we use the term 'search engine', commonly Google and its site ranking system is referred to.

The key to understanding SEO is understanding Google's unique algorithm for evaluating the importance of websites, the so-called page rank system. Page rank counts how many times a site has been linked to by other sites, and measures the importance of those sites as well in determining the end result of how high your website would appear in search results. Five small, relatively unknown sites linking to yours would probably have little to no effect on your page rate. But if some big or well known site links to you, you are likely to go up in the page rank.

A prime example is Wikipedia, whose pages are often the first search result on Google. Since many people draw information from wikipedia, it has many linking pages which catapult its search results to the top. However, it is likely that even sites copying content from Wikipedia help its popularity on Google, as Google probably counts that as well in its page rank system.

Although we outlined a rough idea of how Google's search and ranking algorithm works, the truth is that no one knows precisely how it works. Some claim that trying to promote your site too much in forums or deliberately trying to insert links to your site all over the web may actually hard the page rank of your website, as the Google algorithm is intelligent to detect such attempts to 'game the system'.

The question for you, as a small business wishing to get more exposure through the web, is first try to make your offer dynamic. If you just have a static page telling about business, not changing a lot and maybe containing a small news page – Google is likely to ignore you. Attaching a blog in the form of Wordpress to your site may add dynamicity and attract readers, which can link back. In fact, the Wordpress software has special ways to link back, provided that the other person also has Wordpress or other software interacting with it – the key is simply to open up to social interacting with your users, which ultimately will draw more in bound links, a higher page rank, thus more traffic, more readers, and so on.

Other good methods are trying to expose yourself on social networks. Twitter and Facebook are amongst the popular one, but today you may be wishing to go with the current tide and try to promote yourself on Google+, or at least prepare your online presence there for when the site launches. It is likely that in order to promote its own social network better, Google will use its power to actually attribute more value and important to business pages on Google+ than on other social networks – which is only understandable.


You can learn more about search optimisation ideas by reading Simon Barnett's other articles. This article may be used by any website publisher, though this resource box must always be included in full.