The Motive Web Design Glossary
search engine optimisation (SEO)
Search engine optimisation is a process or strategy for creating webpage content to improve a website’s relevance ranking on a search engine results page (SERP).
Factors influencing webpage ranking
NZ search engine use
Search engines commonly used by New Zealanders include Google, Yahoo! and Bing (formerly MSN Live Search). [1]
In the early days of the web, search engine optimisation involved carefully crafting metadata, setting up link farms and building reciprocal links to improve a website’s popularity―Google, for one, factors the number of links that point to a webpage (incoming links) when calculating relevance ranking (PageRank).
As the search industry has matured, additional factors have come into play including:
- invisible content, such alternative texts for images;
- webpage filename/address (URL);
- syndication of content through blogs;
- use of structural markup;
- and paid placement such as Google’s AdWords service.
Search optimisation basics
Search engine optimisation starts by learning about the language that potential customers are likely to use when talking about a product or service — they are likely to the same language when entering words into a search engine.
gateway page, meta tags, PageRank, robots.txt, search engine, search engine marketing, spider.
References and further reading
- [1] Leading New Zealand search engines, July 2009 (Hitwise)
- The new search engine rules (Media Zeal)
28 Dec 2003: In late 2003, Google updated their ranking algorithm reducing the relevance ranking of sites they consider to be ‘over-optimised’; also ‘correcting’ rankings achieved through link rings and blogs. - Have you SEO’d your search feature? (Marketing Hub)
Improving search engine ranking by generating internal search results pages based on popular search keywords. - How to promote your website (James Archer, Forty Media)
A succinct overview of web-based methods for attracting people to your website. - Inside
the searcher’s mind (Part I): It’s a jungle in here (WebProNews)
Research into how people search. Also an interesting aside on ‘crossing the anonymity threshold’. - Inside
the mind of a searcher (Part II): Search behaviour explored (WebProNews)
Profiling the types of search behaviour. Capturing clicks and conversions. Catering to ‘Researchers’ and ‘Purchasers’. - Search
engine optimization…Free!
Tutorial on optimising your webpages for search engines. - SEU: Search engine useless (Standardzilla)
Common reasons why a webpage won’t achieve a high search engine ranking: iFrames, Flash, AJAX, video and audio (without text equivalents), and lack of content.
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