What Is SEO Anyway?

Search Engine Optimisation, more often referred to as SEO, is simply the practice of enhancing certain elements of your website specifically with the intention of increasing rankings within Google and other major search engines for the keywords and search terms relating t your website’s content. But why is it such a big deal?

Anyone who has looked into SEO has probably heard the term ‘spiders,’ or ‘crawlers,’ which are essentially the bots that search engines send to scour the web. The information these bots retrieve makes up the search results within the search engines. By carrying out on page optimisation on your website, you make changes that assist these bots to know exactly what your website is relevant for.

There’s a good reason that people would invest in search engine optimisation, as we steadily become a society full of cyber shoppers. We simply love the Internet. We can get anything there, from clothing, to food, to car insurance and a whole host of other things as well. We certainly take advantage of it, too.

In fact, in 2009 just in the UK, consumers amassed a total online shopping spend of 38 billion, predicted by Forrester Research to rise to 56 billion by 2014. That’s a huge online spend, especially when you consider the fact that the UK was in the grip of a recession from which it did not officially emerge until the end of the year.

More and more businesses are switching on to the fact that simply having a website is really not enough unless people can actually find it. And as Internet users globally have something of a love affair with Google and the other major search engines, ranking well within them is a key way of generating website traffic from consumers searching for your products and services.

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