SEO

More and more people are inquiring about SEO or Search Engine Optimization. It makes perfect sense right? The tilt of the world towards the web has increased rapidly over the past 5 years and continues to do so. The more it does, the more websites are created and the more people want to be seen and heard.

After a basic pol was done with basic web designers that YOU might spoken to about a website, just over 1 out of 10 people don’t think SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is mandatory; and what really surprised me is about 24% don’t even know what SEO is! If you’re among the quarter of people who don’t know what SEO is or understand how it can help you, you should really read on and do a bit more research. This is just a little bit about how designers or YOU as a client can become a bit more SEO “savy” in order to learn about making it easier for websites or blogs to be found by search engines. I’ll explain the common mistakes made by designers and developers. Then I’ll provide some basic tips that you should be practicing to optimize your site for search engines.

Why Should You Learn About SEO?

* SEO isn’t only for online marketers and major corporation, but as a web developer or designer, most on-site SEO is your responsibility. If you are a client, please make note of this before allowing just ANYBODY to design and develop your website.
* If your site is not search engine friendly, you might be losing a lot of traffic that you’re not even aware of. Remember, besides visitors typing in “www.yourwebsite.co.za” and backlink referrals; search engines are the only way people can find your site. If you are not appearing on websites, you are LOST!
* There are many benefits of getting a high ranking site.
* SEO is also a value-added service. As a client/business owner looking for a company to design a company website should make sure that they are getting SEO along with the pretty picture that gets designed.

The Basics: How Search Engines Work?

First, let’s look at how crawler-based search engines work (both Google and Yahoo fall in this category). Each search engine has its own automated program called a “web spider” or “web crawler” that crawls the web. The main purpose of the spider is to crawl web pages, read and collect the content, and follow the links (both internal and external). The spider then deposits the information collected into the search engine’s database called the index.

When searchers enter a query in the search box of a search engine, the search engine’s job is to find the most relevant results to the query by matching the search query to the information in its index.

What makes or breaks a search engine is how well it answers your question when you perform a search. That’s based on what’s called the search engine algorithm which is basically a bunch of factors that the search engine uses to say “hey is this page RELEVANT or NOT?”. The higher your page ranks for these factors (yes some factors are more important than others) then the higher your page will get displayed in the search engine result pages.
Thats my job as a SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZER

SEO jobs

Each search engine has its own algorithm in ranking web pages. Understanding the general factors that influence the algorithm can affect your search result position, and this is what SEO experts are hired for. An SEO’s job has two aspects: On-Site and Off-Site.

On-Site SEO: are the things that you can do on your site, such as: HTML markups, target keywords, internal linking, site structure, etc.

Off-Site SEO: are the things that you have much less control of, such as: how many backlinks you get and how people link to your site.

This is a guide for designers and developers. The main concern is the On-Site aspects. Secretly though, if you do your job right… and design a beautiful site… and/or produce useful content… you’ll get Off-Site backlinks and social bookmarks without even lifting a finger.

Please know that we are not experts at SEO, but we do know what we are doing. So before you go and trust somebody else with designing a great site that will NEVER be seen online, then think twice. Give us a shout and we will gladly assist you.

Good Luck.