The Cornerstone to a Successful Website: SEO

What is SEO?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, it can be best described as the process of increasing the visibility of your website on search engines to attract your target audience. More so, it is the “process which improves the volume and quality of traffic to a website from search engines via natural search results for targeted keywords. Search engine optimiser’s aid website to be easily found in search engines”. Res. J. Computer & IT Sci.2013

According to Research Journal of Computer and Information Technology Sciences (2013), the internet is a jungle and has millions of users. Millions across the globe rely on search engines as their go-to place when seeking information, be it for academics, business, and leisure or for any other reason they deem worthy. People frequent the web through search engines. However, search engine users are most likely to go for the top few result pages that appear in the search. Thus this highlights the importance of promoting your website in a search engine to increasing your chances of visibility. To assist users to find that which they are looking for easily, search engines find and filter the most relevant information to match the displayed search of the user. 

What is a Search Engine: 

A Search Engine is an internet searchable database collecting data from internet webpages. The database then indexes the data and stores it making it accessible when searched with the relevant keywords. Popular search engines are Google, Yahoo, Bing and Alta Vista to name a few.

 A Search engine has three parts:  

• Spider: Deploys a robot program called a spider or robot designed to track down web pages. It follows the links these pages contain, and adds information to search engines’ database. Example: Googlebot (Google’s robot program) 

• Index: Database containing a copy of each Web page gathered by the spider. 

• Search engine software is Technology that enables users to query the index and that returns results in a schematic order. W.M. Tharanga D. Ranasinghe

How important is your website design in SEO: 

Nursel YalçÕn in ‘What is search engine optimization: SEO?’ explains how the website is an important factor to consider during search engine optimisation. He suggests the following guidelines to achieve ample results:

• Choosing a short website name: 

Website name must be short, simple and relevant to the objective of the website. Avoid using special characters such as (and, like) as this will result in the page ranking low. 

• Avoid Flash animations:

Use a limited number of flash animations and animated pictures because these lower the amount of loading time of web pages though these may help in improving the look and feel of website however flash animation cannot be easily indexed by bots.

• Simple website design:

When choosing a website design people may prefer going for a complex design that boosts the appearance of their brand however to encourage search engine optimisation websites must have simple structured content so that they can be easily in indexed.

• HTML Websites get preference:

HTML is a HyperText Markup Language file format used as the basis of a web page. HTML is a file extension used interchangeably with HTM. HTML is consists of tags surrounded by angle brackets The HTML tags can be used to define headings, paragraphs, lists, links, quotes, and interactive forms. It can also be used to embed Javascript, and CSS (cascading style sheets). (M Rouse 2010). 

For effective results on search pages, you must use tags related to your web page as opposed to frames because frames hinder operations performed by spiders. 

• Use alt labels for pictures 

Good websites consist of PNG picture formats because PNG displays a picture in high quality at a low size. All pictures must be ‘alt’ labelled for fitting definition and introduction in search engines.  

Improving your website ranking 

In conclusion, now that you have learnt the information above, you now know what Search Engine Optimisation is and its importance. You have also learnt tips on how to tweak your website to improve its ranking. This article is concluded by giving you ways of how to improve the current ranking of your site and how you can optimise on the identified ranking: 

• Get an SEO audit 

There are many Free SEO audit sites which you can find online. The sites will help you to identify technical errors which may be hindering your site from ranking top in search engines. For example Suability a free site checks can get you free SEO score and individual sub-scores for each of the categories checked, including meta-information, page quality, page structure, link structure, server configuration, and external factors. (https://www.seobility.net/en/seocheck/) 

• Consistency

 You need to be consistent in publishing content. When you are consistent in your updates this displays the site’s relevancy 

• Use alt tags in your website 

You need to Always add descriptions to your media be it pictures, videos all other multimedia or visual media 

• Create relevant links within your texts 

Always create relevant links within your text. When hyperlinking people make the mistake of linking text as ‘Click here’ however to improve search engine optimisation you must properly label the hyperlink with relevant text because that adds currency to your searches 

 References: 

 Margaret Rouse WhatIs.com 2010: https://whatis.techtarget.com/fileformat/HTML-A-Web-page 

Research Journal of Computer and Information Technology Sciences Vol. 1(1), 10-13, February (2013)

W.M. Tharanga D. Ranasinghe. Search Engine: an effective tool for exploring the Internet. 2006

https://www.seobility.net/en/seocheck/ 

https://www.mtu.edu/umc/services/digital/seo/ 

https://blogs.mtu.edu/webmaster/2016/04/best-practices-search-engine-optimization-and-usability/