Where am I?

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

Where am I?

The first thing most people do when they launch a new website is fire up Google, enter a relevant search term and …… discover they are not on the first page, or the second, or the third.

Those with a lot of patience will keep trawling through the results to discover that their site is wallowing somewhere down in the 1000’s.

Why is this? I sell family cars, my website is about family cars and I entered ‘family cars’ into Google – I should be at the top of the list!

To explain this let’s travel back a few years (before the internet) and think about someone buying a family car for the first time. If they were to approach the task logically, how might they decide which car to get? Well one method might be:

1. Make a list of the features they need. Must have four doors, a big boot, under £20,000 etc.
2. Walk around car parks looking for cars that they like the look of.
3. Ask a professional (a mechanic or salesman) for their recommendation.
4. Read reviews in newspapers and magazines.
5. Ask friends for advice.

Steps 1 and 2 are about identifying the need whereas steps 3, 4 and 5 are concerned with narrowing down the field to those vehicles which meet the need identified.

From this our prospective car buyer will probably now have a list of 5 or 10 potentially suitable family cars and can happily go off and spend their hard earned money.

Now, let’s take this a step further and apply the process to Google, what do they have to do when someone enters ‘family cars’ into their search engine?

1. Identify web sites which mention family cars (identify the need).
2. Narrow the field so the searcher gets relevant results.

Google calls the process narrowing the field ‘ranking’.

If we enter ‘family cars’ Google will return around 380,000,000 results. So why is whatcar.co.uk the first one returned? Why is their site so highly ranked by Google?

Well, let’s return to our family car buyer for a moment and consider steps 3, 4, and 5 above. How do they decide which reviews to read or which friends to ask?

This question of who to ask, or relevance, is key to understanding how web sites are ranked. If you have a friend who can’t drive it is unlikely you would seek their advice. You would most likely place more relevance on someone who has driven for 20 years and has a family than on someone who has only owned one sports car. I know that I’d rather listen to a friend who was a mechanic rather than a used car salesman.

So, Google needs to assess why ‘whatcar.co.uk’ is more relevant to our searcher than ‘can you transport Weiner pigs in a family car’ (which I found on page 10 of the search results).

How do they do it? Well that’s a difficult question to answer because only a handful of people in the world know, and they all work for Google. We do know that over 200 different aspects of a web page are considered when calculating its ranking score and that these change frequently.

The process of ensuring that your site ranks highly is known as ‘Search Engine Optimisation’ or SEO for short. Like a mechanic, Internet experts like Dimasoft are able to amend your website, making it Google friendly.

Like the friend who has driven for 20 years, we create links to your site. Links to your site makes Google think ‘hmmm, people think the content on this site is so good that they want to link to it, they must know what they are talking about –  so we will give it a higher score’.

SEO is not a quick fix, rather it should be viewed as a medium term strategy and given at least 6 months to deliver results, but when you consider 48% of internet searchers click somewhere on the first page results of Google it’s an investment worth considering.

And finally – the answer is yes, you can transport Weiner pigs in a family car provided you adhere to the EC Regulation on the protection of animals during transport and related operations (1/2005) – isn’t the internet wonderful!

So this highlights the importance of SEO services, click here to find the right package for you. www.dimasoft.co.uk/seo/