The basics about SEO
Websites are marketing and sales tools that are in general created to attract a growing number of customers to your website. Therefore, having a
website is not enough; you also need to promote it.
This happens mainly in Google and to obtain a favourable position in Google you will have to optimise your website.
Market research
Optimisation should start with proper market research of your target customers and your competition. If possible you should find out which keywords are literally typed in by your potential customers when they search for your specific goods or services. This will ensure that your website appears in the search results when your customers are looking for them in Google and you should optimise your web pages for those keywords.
Note, that many keywords used by your customers might be entirely different from what you expect them to use...
Landing pages
Each page in our website is a potential landing page where people arrive directly from Google. Each page should have its own unique subject and should be optimised for those keywords, which will bring visitors interested in this subject directly to that page.
This means most of your visitors might never see your homepage. Instead they will arrive directly at the page with the specific content they are interested in.
Importance of design, user-friendliness and navigation
Google is a business. The people that search are Google’s clients and Google tries to serve its clients as best as possible. This means that there is no “trick” to Google. Google will simply place the best website first, as that will make its clients happy.
To determine the “value” of a website, Google will consider every single part of it: the text, design, ease of navigation; it all matters to Google and determines where your site appears in the search results: as number one or 1 million.
How does Google know if my site is the best?
Google "reads" every page on the internet, indexes the words on that page and looks at the page titles and the paragraph titles on that page to determine what the main subject of the page is. Therefore it is important to focus each the content of a page on its specific subject/keyword. Make sure the keyword appears a couple of times in the text and in the page and paragraph titles.
However, once Google brings the correct visitors to your site, the content also has to be appealing to them and has to be user-friendly and motivating enough, to ensure those visitors do business with you. Thus you will have to make sure that the content is easy and pleasant to read, otherwise you immediately lose the customer you worked so hard on to get to your page.
Therefore, Google optimisation is best done by creating a site that delivers the most value to your customers. If your visitors are happy, then Google will most likely also be happy.