Search Engine Optimisation Simplified

Fundamentally, SEO is the study of how Search Engines organise sites on their organic search lists. These lists are the main results that are shown when you do a search. They are not to be confused with the Pay per Click entries. The paid listings are typically in a yellow section at the top of the page, and in a column down the right hand side. All the rest have naturally been put into position. The Search Engines look at a site’s relevancy and value when establishing its position in the hierarchy.

Clearly, the goal is to get to the top of the page. Nobody will know we’re there if we’re way down on page eight! No-one knows all the factors that Search Engines (SE’s) use to determine your rank. The SE’s really don’t want anyone to know – so you can’t manipulate or ‘game’ their system.

So, over the years a complete industry has grown up around this. And so we have on one side Google and Bing purposely patenting different technologies. Causing much mystification about their methods! And then you have an industry built around SEO. This uses empirical testing and measuring of various factors to determine which ones are the most important.

There are two sides to SEO: ‘On-Page’ factors & ‘Off-Page’ factors. In addition there are geographic and demographic factors, but SEO cannot control these. (Off-Page optimisation is examined in an additional feature.)

SE ‘On Page’ Optimisation

Making changes directly to website pages to make them more Search Engine friendly is what On-Page SEO is all about. This website configuration is fairly simple. Doing things such as: Using internal links, keywords, header tags and meta tags.

That might sound like gobbledy-gook, but don’t be alarmed! Actually, though on page work is straightforward it probably accounts for little. In fact, it is widely believed that it has very little effect at all anymore. Search Engines used to credit on page factors in the past. That’s not how it is now though.

If a site has a lot of in-bound back-links though, on-page factors can still be beneficial. If that’s the case, internal linking and a certain amount of on-page fine-tuning can reap rewards.

A Bit of Advice… A phrase that shows vast numbers of results should not be your first SEO target. For example, on Google’s Search Engine you’ll see 70 million listings in the UK for the term Car Insurance. It’s not rocket science to realise that competing in this area wouldn’t be productive.

However… If I typed in “Southampton Car Insurance”, then there are only around 300,000 results. (If car insurance in Southampton was my business!) So a much more realistic target.

I’ve a much better chance in the rankings having added the word ‘Southampton’. In reality, getting ranked for car insurance would cost a fortune! I’d actually be head to head with the really big boys. So not a great idea – especially, in fact, when there are much better ways to go about it.

We should concentrate on more accurate ‘phrases’ that give us less competition. We call them Long-tail phrases, as they’re made up of a few particularly chosen keywords. If your market’s very competitive, you could be selecting seven word phrases. Typically they will be 3 or 4 words long.

We prefer to begin optimisation strategies with phrases that bring in less than five hundred thousand results. Sometimes we’ll consider higher counts if the top results are not benefitting from optimisation. Over time we’ll gain ground on the larger search terms. This will happen automatically through building back links. We can go for some of those after several months if we’ve SEO’d well. It’s a much more targeted strategy. Frankly, we’re only interested in the customers who are looking specifically for what we offer. There’s much more chance these people will buy!

Don’t just limit building back links to your website’s home page – link them up to various sub pages as well. The SE’s respond well to this. Category or Product Group pages are a good example. It’s worth driving specific search terms to these pages – they often have links to lots of other product pages. The home page shouldn’t be the only one to receive back-links. Bing, Yahoo and Google are all paying more attention to the way a website’s pages are managed and listed.