Basics Of Search Engine Optimization – Why You Need To Know?
When it comes to getting search engine rankings for your Hong Kong locally based company website, it is like this: When a person on Google or Yahoo does a search, the search engines have to go through the index while matching the user’s query (i.e. keyword search), and return the pages (as search results) in an order that is relevant to the user. The ranking is determined by the relevance. It means the more relevant your content or your web page is to the user’s search query, the higher your page is supposed to rank.
But any SEO expert would have told you that before any of your page is eligible to show up in Google’s and Yahoo’s search results pages, the search engines have to first put your pages in their index. The index is a very large database of all the information that the search engines have discovered all over the internet. When the information gets updated by the respective website owners (or webmasters), the search engines would update the rankings of these pages according to search algorithms.
The worst case can be that your HK based company site shows up nowhere in Google’s and Yahoo’s search results. But there is always a reason for that to happen. Your company site may be a new brand name and has not been discovered and crawled by the search engines’ crawlers. A second reason you should check against is that your site’s navigation may have been designed too hard for a normal crawler to go through and is blocking search engines to access most of your pages. Your site could have been mistakenly added those crawler directives that would have actively blocked search engine’s access. So there are a few things that you need to check. At least you should make sure there are links from other sites that are pointing to your pages. Search engines are able to follow these links into your site and access your pages.
You should in fact develop a good habit of using some webmaster tools. One webmaster tool is Google’s official tool which is free – Search Console. In Search Console’s reports, it can show you the monitored crawl errors and index coverage when Google tried to access your pages but has failed for some reasons. Through Search Console, you can submit a sitemap that contains all the pages of your site, and come back later to check how many pages have been added to Google’s index.
When we talk about SEO, we often mention Google. But what about other search engines such as Bing, Yahoo, and more? In the real world, Google has the most users in most of the countries (except a few). In many countries and regions Google alone has captured more than 90% of use, leaving Yahoo and Bing combined to have less than 10% of use. At least in the Hong Kong market, it is like this. So it makes sense to focus much more on Google in terms of search engine optimization strategies and implementation work.
