SEO: What And Why?

SEO is the short form of, ‘search engine optimisation,’. Search engine optimisation, as you might well be able to guess from its name, it’s all about optimising your website for the purpose of making it rank better within the search engines. But the question is, why do businesses in particular even bother with it?

Search engines use what we call spiders or crawlers to sour the web and return all the information that will then be displayed in the search engines according to what people are searching for. Optimising your website basically means implementing minor things within the page that indicate to the bots what your topic matter is and what keywords might be relevant to you. It’s critical not to let this hinder the human user experience of the site though.

We love the Internet. Over recent years the number of people using it to make purchases or enquire about potential purchases has risen rapidly. We can buy anything online from car insurance, to food and clothing!

In the UK alone, shopper spent a staggering 38 billion in 2009 – despite only officially coming out of recession towards the end of that very year. Forrester Research also forecast that the online spend in the UK will reach 56 billion by 2014. With all that money being spent online, is it really any wonder that businesses want their websites to be the ones that are found by the consumers seeking the products and services they retail?

More and more businesses are switching on to the fact that simply having a website is really not enough unless people can actually find it. And as Internet users globally have something of a love affair with Google and the other major search engines, ranking well within them is a key way of generating website traffic from consumers searching for your products and services.

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