On average 65 per cent of visitors to a website find the website via search engine results. Google is the dominant search engine accounting for 85 per cent of Irish search engine usage. Search engine optimisation is a practice of improving internal and external aspects of a website in order to increase the traffic the site receives from search engines’ natural results. Search engines have algorithms that assign importance to different elements of the website namely domain name, website structure, meta tags, and link building.
Website structure: the foundation of any search engine optimisation effort is to ensure the website design and build is search engine friendly.
Relevant keywords: the Google Keyword Tool allows website owners to submit their website and it will generate a list of search phrases along with the monthly searches for that key phrase on the search engine.
Content is king: write original and descriptive content for each web page and make sure that the page has a specific focus.
Meta tags: each web page has meta tags so it is important to have unique meta tags on each page. Search engines only crawl the first 70 characters of the meta title, so important key phrases such as “Galway Hotels, Hotels Galway City, Luxury Galway Hotels” would be a good meta title for a luxury Galway hotel.
Link building: a sign of the importance and relevance of a website for search engines is the number and quality of other websites that point to your website.
These are the basic principles of search engine optimisation and are just one of the topics covered in Aró’s online marketing courses which run one day and one evening a week. Visit www.aro.ie/workshops for more details.
