UX Search Engine Optimisation

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the practise of producing websites that can be effectively and accurately be categorised by search engines.

The aim of SEO is for a website to rank highly in the 'natural' search results of the major search engines. For most websites, this means not only the homepage ranking in the top ten of search results, but other – preferably all – website pages ranking highly.

In the UK this means optimising principally for Google, by far the dominant search engine. In other territories, the USA for example, Yahoo becomes more important. In Russia Yandex is the leading search engine, and in China Baidu.

SEO does not mean that a site should rank highly for any search. The purpose is to rank highly for relevant, targeted, user search queries.

It is highly desirable to build SEO into a UX web design project. It is much more efficent and effective to build a searche engine optimised website from the start, than to optimise an existing site.

One important UX or user centred design (UCD) aspect to SEO is through user research to anticipate the search queries users who would want to use your website would use.

An investment in SEO pays many times back its return on investment. If your website is your store front, you want to be on the main street, which is in the Google top ten for elevenat searches. An SEO strategy will inform the site Information archecture, and provide a basis for writing search engine effective copy.

While the homepage is important in SEO, all pages on a website

Other known elements of Google's algorhithm

How long the domain has existed for
How reliable is the sites availability
The domain the site is on. Having a restricted UK domain such as a .gov.uk domain or a .ac.uk.
The homepage is almost always assigned a higher PageRank than other pages in the domain.

Things that play no part in Googles algorhitm include:

There is no evidence that having a .com domain – which because the World Wide Web in administered by a US government department, is actually a US, rather than international domain as the name suggets – is advantageous over having a .co.uk domain.

Search engine Marketing & search engine submission