People not involved in website optimisation often have difficulty understanding search engine optimisation and the different methods that are involved. Some of the following basic SEO concepts may help you:

1. Link building is important

Links are like votes for a website. The more votes a website has, the better the rankings.

2. There are different link types

Search engines consider the relevance of the links. Links from unrelated websites don't help as much (and can actually harm your rankings) as links from relevant websites. A link from a website that has many inbound links for itself counts more than a link from an unpopular website.

3. It's important to keep on link building

It does not help to just get more links than your competing web pages. The quality of the links is just as important and your competitors will also continue to build links. For that reason, it's important to know that link building is an ongoing activity.

4. Buying links can get you in trouble

Search engines don't like paid links because they treat links to your website as editorial votes. Google has officially stated that it considers paid links as an attempt to game the system and penalises websites that buy links. Even if Google cannot automatically find all paid links to your website, your competitors might report your website.

Try to get high quality organic links if possible.

5. Redirects can cause problems

Redirects have been used by spammers in the past and some search engines still have difficulties with that. If you have to use redirections on your website, only use 301 redirects.

A 301 redirect is the only server side redirect that is defined as a permanent redirect. That means that search engines will follow the links and pass the links from the old URL to the new URL.

6. Duplicate content can cause problems

Search engines want to return as many different results as possible in their results. That is why search engines only list one copy of a document in their search results.

For that reason, you shouldn't promote more than one domain for the same website and you should have unique content on your web pages.

Near copies are also considered duplicate content, for example, when the same article is listed on more than one website.

7. Why your web pages must be optimised

Search engines use simple software programs to index web pages. These web pages analyse the text on a web page to determine what it is all about.

If a keyword is mentioned in the right places and in the right frequency, search engines will consider the web page relevant to that keyword. If a keyword is mentioned too often, search engines might penalise a website because it looks like a spamming attempt.

8. Keywords are the key to your success

It's important to choose the right keywords for search engine optimisation. Single word keywords can be very popular but they seldom lead to sales. Industry specific keywords can be so special that no one searches for them. The perfect keyword is targeted, has a high search volume and leads to sales.

Search engine optimisation is not rocket science but it requires some work and ongoing efforts. If you understand the basic SEO concepts, it's easier to get top 10 rankings on Google and other major search engines.

If you need help with your website, then contact us to discuss our search engine optimisation plans.