SEO: What And Why?
SEO is the commonly used acronym for ‘search engine optimisation,’ which is, as the name might give away, the process of optimising your website to increase its rankings in the search engines for the search terms relating to your products, services or website. But why would anyone bother?
Well, search engines such as Google and Yahoo use bots known as crawlers or spiders to scour the web. It’s these crawlers that return the information that features in the search engine. Optimisation on your website itself involves making it clear to these search engine bots, essentially, exactly what keywords and phrases your site is the most relevant for, without hampering the human user experience.
There’s a good reason that people would invest in search engine optimisation, as we steadily become a society full of cyber shoppers. We simply love the Internet. We can get anything there, from clothing, to food, to car insurance and a whole host of other things as well. We certainly take advantage of it, too.
In fact, in 2009 just in the UK, consumers amassed a total online shopping spend of 38 billion, predicted by Forrester Research to rise to 56 billion by 2014. That’s a huge online spend, especially when you consider the fact that the UK was in the grip of a recession from which it did not officially emerge until the end of the year.
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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Author: Tessie Ore
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