Search Engine Organic Listings
There are many misconceptions as to how companies achieve high ranking positions in the 'organic' or 'natural' listings on the search engine results pages.
Some people believe that the more a website is clicked on by users, the higher it will appear in the rankings. Whilst this was actually true to a degree several years ago, people became smart and constantly looked for ways to trick the search engines into thinking that they were the most popular and most relevant website. It was quite easy to develop atomated systems that would click on search engine results giving the search engines a false indication of the true popularity of these websites.
Another belief that many people have is that you just put lots of keywords into the 'keyword metatags' and this will solve the problem. Again, in the past, the search engines did put quite a bit of algorithmic weight behind the keyword metatags' however once again, spammers caught on to the idea that you didn't have to be a bank to rank highly for the phrase 'credit card'. In fact casino websites were experts at ranking highly for keywords that didn't relate to their business.
So how does it work?
There are numerous factors that influence a site’s ability to be ranked highly by the search engines and they vary from one search engine to another. These factors are evolving quickly as search engines become more intelligent. Search engines are still far from having human intelligence and require websites to be presented in a very specific format if they are to rank highly.
Some of the top factors that search engines place a high degree of algorithmic weight are:
- Top level URL and URL extensions
- Page Titles
- Page Descriptions
- Headers
- Internal linking
- Website structure
- Content
- Extenal links linking to your site
In general, your website should rank highly on the search engines without too much effort for keywords that relate to your company name. This is generally because your company name is contained in your website address and search engines place a lot of algorithmic weighting on the website address.
Beyond this, it is generally fairly straight forward to get your website ranking highly for your product names (provided they are not too generic).
The process of making a website attractive to search engines so that it ranks highly in the natural listings for keywords and phrases that relate to products or services that the business is selling and promoting is called Search Engine Optimisation or (SEO).
SEO is complex and resource intensive. It can be a daunting task for most small organisations however SEMA can assist small and medium sized businesses in developing a a clearly defined SEO strategy.
Contact SEMA if you would like to talk about your specific requirements.