We have broken this guide up into the following sections:
Search Engine
Search engines are one of the main ways people navigate the world wide web. To make sure you are getting the most traffic from search engines it is important to find out how search engines work.
Search engines arrive at a website and start copying the information it finds for its own databases. It finds the different pages by following the links in your navigation to each page of your website. They will also follow links away from your website to other website and start doing the same with them.
If a search engine does not already know about your website or cannot find your site from a link you will not get listed in that search engine, not even if someone searches for you exact web address. To tell a search engine your website exists you need to submit your site to them via their website.
When someone goes to a search engine searches for a phrase using the search box the search engine will look through all the copies of all the web pages it has seen picking out every page that is even remotely related to the term that has been searched for. The search engine will then list all the pages it has found in order of what it thinks is most relevant.
To determine which websites are more relevant than others a search engine will look at everything about your website. They also go beyond your website an look at the websites that you link to as well as the websites that link to you.
To give you an idea our company website jarrettandlam.com is filled with content relevant to websites and IT as you would expect. Because over the years we have built so many good veterinary websites we have found we have started to appear (albeit fairly low down) for veterinary related searches as well.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
Search engine optimisation aims to increase your relevance to certain terms and phrases to maximise the high value traffic your website then receives from the search engines. It involves researching what terms and phrases are likely to generate the most valuable traffic and targeting your website to the terms identified and re-enforcing the sites relevance to those terms.
Your aim here is to increase the amount of high value traffic and not just the number of people visiting your website. Thousands of visitors to your site who do not want to join your practice is not going to be as valuable as 100 visitors who are highly likely to turn into paying clients.
It is important to monitor how your website then performs in the main search engines to identify further improvements that could be made.
It is important to be careful when dealing with someone offering SEO services. We are increasingly hearing stories of sales people cold calling businesses like vets guaranteeing to get them at the top of Google. No one can guarantee getting you to the top of Google natural search listing. I would also say none of the reputable SEO providers we know about would cold call people either. We would also be a bit careful of anyone who treats SEO as a secret. There are no secrets in SEO, it is just a very complex subject.
