Search Engine Optimisation – What is it? Is it Absolutely Necessary?

What is Search Engine Optimisation?

In its simplest form, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is making your site appealing to search engines such as Google. 
SEO is based around keyphrases. A keyphrase is a phrase (usually no more than four words) that somebody might type into Google if they were searching for your kind of website. For example, if I was looking for a plumber I might Google the phrase: Plumber Melbourne Northern Suburbs. If you were a plumber in North Melbourne who didn't appear in my search results you might question the quality of the SEO of your website. If you were a plumber without a website then you'd be completely invisible to me, but that's another blog for another time.
Keyphrases can be applied throughout your site, especially in your body text, which is the part of the website viewers can see and the metadata which is the part search engines reference first. It goes much deeper than this though, because Google can see your keyphrases in other areas such as image tags, html notes and even filenames. 
The aim of Search Engine Optimisation is to boost your website's occurrence in the results of a search. First page is great. Top 3 is best. Anything beyond page 3 and you may as well not be there at all, because searchers almost never view past page 3 of their results.
Other factors influence your SEO such as inbound links (links to your website from other websites), the layout of your page and frequency of update.

Is it expensive?

SEO as a marketing technique is amazingly good value. It is relatively cheap, fast to take effect and extremely targeted. Results are easily measured through Google analytics and you can even see if the same people that find you on the search are the ones who click on “buy” or whatever your target may be. As far as accountable marketing spends go, SEO is king.

Is it necessary?

Almost invariably, yes. Most people use search engines to find what they're looking for on the Internet. You need to be there when they look and you need to be one of the first things they see.
There are some exceptions. You may only want people to see your site after they've been to your seminar so that the site makes sense. You may have an exclusive clientele who already know the website and other audiences are irrelevant. 
Exceptions to the rule are few and far between and I can safely assume that you, the reader, DO want people to find your website on search engines in which case YES you DO need your site search engine optimised.

I will blog in more depth about SEO in the future, but I write to a small business audience, not web developers, so if you want in-depth discussion you should check out the writings of the clever people on the hubspot blog. 


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