Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) Explained

This eBook was authored by Phil Baddock, Qualified Google Advertising Professional.

(Salsa Internet has 1 individual who has passed the Google Advertising Professional Exam).

Introduction - What is Search Engine Optimisation?

Search Engine Optimisation, or “SEO” as it’s referred to in the web industry, refers to things that you’ll do to elevate your website in the Free Search Engine results. If you’re not sure of the difference between free results and the paid listings, the following diagram shows the difference.

Sometimes the free search results are referred to as the “organic results” or the “natural results”, as they are not influenced by commercial interests and are based purely on the search engine companies algorithms and indexing techniques.

Why is ranking well in the Free Listings important?

Well, not surprisingly, users click on the free listings more often than they click on the paid advertisements. As you can see there are some paid search results displayed above the free results for some searches. Unfortunately for advertisers, users have trained their eye to all but ignore most paid advertising, and so the free results are the main focus of their attentions. As consumers, we learn to ignore the ads!

Some industry experts estimate that there are as many as 100 clicks on the Free Listings, for each one time that a user clicks on the paid advertisements.

This doesn’t mean that paid advertising isn’t important, it is – particularly if you are just starting out on your SEO journey, and your website is currently not ranked highly - but you need to get some immediate traffic to your website.

In the medium term however, ranking well in the free listings will create a very significant engine for delivering visitors to your website. One Salsa customer, Barcrusher Boats experienced a 100% increase in website visitors within 4 weeks of commencing search engine optimisation. While there are no guarantees, chances are if haven’t done any SEO on your website, it’s highly likely that these sorts of traffic increases are readily available to you. What does that mean – MORE SALES!! Yes, seriously – you will have more people viewing your product info, more people inquiring, and more people buying your products….LOTS more people.

So how do you get ranked well in the Free Search Results?

Well, if you do some searching on Google or the other resources about SEO online, you’ll be told that by following a few simple steps (updating your titles, meta tags, and keywords etc) that you can rank highly. These are usually good pieces of advice, but often these lists or web resources don’t explain which of these many processes are the important ones and they often don’t explain how to go about it – that’s what this eBook intends to do.

We’d love to explain every aspect of SEO, but there are literally hundreds of things that you can do to help your search engine rankings, so instead we’re going to guide you through some of the most important processes to improve your ranking, and by the end of this eBook, you’ll know how to do it yourself or instruct your web designer on what you need done. In fact – feel free to just point them at this eBook and tell them “do that stuff to my website”….or of course, Salsa Internet can help out if you need it.

For SEO experts, this paper won't be covering highly advanced topics unfortunately, although we will touch on a few techniques that are beyond the basics. This paper is aimed to help people who are new to SEO, or small business owners who want to know what’s involved or how to get their website much higher in the search rankings.

What we’ll be covering in this eBook:

A Good Process for Basic Optimisation:

Identifying the keyword search terms that you should be ranking for.
Optimising your HTML page <title>’s
Optimising your <meta description> tag’s & keyword tags
Optimising your page content
Building links to your website

If you’re in a hurry – following these steps 1 – 5 above will greatly improve your search ranking. But we have a bunch of more miscellaneous slightly more advanced topics for you too: