When people start talking about SEO, they become animated and to an outsider it seems they know every nuance of this rather vast subject. Now for any newbie to online marketing this is rather intimidating. So they simply nod and agree that optimisation is absolutely important and that it must be implemented. While they are agreeing to all of this, in reality they don’t have a clue what the others are talking about. They do know about SEO, but do not really know why it is important to their website and their business.

Why is optimisation important?

Search engine optimisation is the various tactics used to improve your website’s placing in the SERPs; the search engine results pages. The basics of optimisation are to identify those keywords and key phrases that are the best for your specific business. Those keywords are then strategically used throughout your website in your web content. There is more to SEO than keywords, but that is the basic part of it. The search engine bots come and crawl a website and look for those identifying keywords.

If it does not find them consistently, the page cannot be ranked for those keywords. On the other hand you cannot simply stuff those keywords into every sentence throughout your web content.  This is considered search engine spam and unethical; it will bring harm instead of benefits to your website and business.

Optimisation is the expertise and knowledge of balancing those keywords to make the content acceptable to the search engines. At the same time it will be flowing and easy to read for human visitors. a good balancing blend of between 2 and 3% is considered optimum.

Benefits over the long term

Optimisation brings long-term benefits that other forms of advertising cannot give a website. Usually with ad campaigns, once it has ended you need to start another and that is costly. With SEO the benefits keeps going as long as you keep maintaining and updating your website regularly. Once your web pages have been indexed you get site visitors through the search engines and it does not cost you anything.

Your content speaks for itself in keeping your site visitors interested. There are various tools available to analyse your web traffic and measure how successful your SEO is where certain keywords are concerned. Analysis will give you the feedback as to where and how you must tweak for greater appeal.

Your content must support your SEO

Some website owners do not see the necessity for them to have content with value; content that give information about products, services and industry related information. They see their websites primarily as their online shop, they list their merchandise and that is all. People want more than just product lists; they want background, perks of products and how it will benefit them.

If you neglect to give them information that they are looking for, they will simply go elsewhere to find that information. They will then become paying customers for the business where they found valuable information and not return to your website.

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