So what is a search engine?

A search engine is any program that allows you to search the internet for content, the most famous one being Google with others being such things as Bing and Yahoo. There are others but their use is so low that you can get away with ignoring them really.

The most used by far is Google with almost 70% market share so that is the one to focus on! It is certainly the only one who’s name has become a verb! What do you need to find – have you Googled it?

So how does a search engine work?

Well this is the $395 billion question! (that’s how much Google is estimated to be worth currently).

Exactly how Google’s search engine works is unknown, that’s how they want to keep it, if people know exactly how it works, then people can cheat the system. So for the most part they keep its exact workings close to their chest.

Essentially Google is looking for relevancy. If you typed “kennels in Chelmsford” into Google and it came up with a list of hot air balloon companies in Derbyshire you wouldn’t really trust it to find what you were looking for would you?

Ok that’s an extreme example, but lets analyse this – SEO “experts” will reel off an entire list of things that Google looks for on, in and linking from/to your website. The exact convention as to what is more or less important changes regularly.

The main thing we would advise you to remember are two main points:

1. Relevancy – Google’s overriding aim is to bring you, their customer, the most relevant results corresponding to what you typed into the search box. So if you type in “kennels in Chelmsford” it’ll bring you back a list of websites for kennels that are based in and around Chelmsford – that is what they are aiming to achieve.

2. Money talks – of course Google isn’t valued at $395 billion by making no money. There are many, many, many ways that Google makes money and selling advertising space is just one of them, so you may have noticed when you type in certain searches you’ll get a few results at the top of the page with the little yellow “Ad” icon against them?

These are those that have paid to be there using Google AdWords. What they are doing is paying to come up in the top spot(s) under the search term you have typed in. In the example above it was “Law firms in London” – so you can see how the search bolds the relevant keywords you typed in within the results.

Unfortunately, the way of the world is that getting to the top of Google’s listing is often a pricey process. You’re usually going to have to pay and SEO company to work on it for you. Unless you can afford to employ your own internal SEO person to work on it all the time.

So what is SEO?

So SEO is the process and work by which your site climbs up Google’s (and/or other search engines) rankings. It involves having to identify what your customers are likely to be typing into a search engine and then targeting your site toward those keywords or phrases.

SEO does not work on the Google AdWords results, it works on the Organic results, these are those that come up under the adverts. Google the phrase we did – “law firms in London” you’ll get three ad results followed by some organic results as well as some Map Results – we won’t get into the Map Results right now but we will explain those in another blog another time – too much to get into right now.

SEO generally involves working on other things within the site that can help improve your chances of climbing Google’s rankings and reaching more potential customers. You probably know that for most people the world ends at the bottom of Page 1 of a Google search! If you’re not on page one, your chances drop considerably!

So what can you do about it?

The first thing we’ll say is this, SEO is something you ought to at the very least be paying attention to, secondly – it’s going to require some investment; either through committing your own time or by paying someone else for theirs.

We have written a blog on a 5 step self-SEO guide which could really help you understand what you can do to improve your SEO and what you can do yourself to make it better!

Why should you care?

The main reason – because sooner or later your competition (if they aren’t already) will invest in SEO and will start to outstrip you and start sucking potential customers in via the online arena where, most people go as their first port of call when they need to find something new.

Ignore it at your peril. Just a friendly bit of advice. If you’d like anymore information or any further advice on SEO then you can always ask us!