SEO - Search Engine Optimisation
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Search engine optimisation is one of those catch all terms that covers a multitude of technical and marketing techniques. Essentially search engine optimisation, or SEO, is when a webpage or website is altered to make it appear higher up the search engine results for keyword searches.
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How It Works
SEO uses a combination of marketing and technical knowledge to improve the ranking of a website in search engine listings. To do this, many website elements must be taken into account, for example links, content and site architecture.
But making your website work online isn't just about HTML, keywords and links. Search engine success depends on combining experience in marketing, design, usability, optimisation, brand management and copywriting to produce tailored strategies that focuses on making a website, and brand, as visible as possible in the online world. That expensive website isn't going to do much for your business if no-one can find it.
Google, Yahoo, MSN and other search engines all focus on different criteria when it comes to ranking a website, but essentially the all operate in the same way.
Search engines send out information retrieval programmes called spiders to crawl the internet and to find documents to bring back to its index. In the index, it filters these documents according to its criteria and stores the quality ones.
When someone makes a keyword search from the search engine, it assesses the sites in its index, evaluating which documents are the most relevant (based on their criteria) before returning possible matches to the user in the form of search results.
Why It's Important
91% of adults who have used the internet have used a search engine to find information. If they can’t find your website, they will certainly find a competitor’s, which is why search engine optimisation has increasingly become an integral part of a company’s marketing and PR efforts.
New businesses often find that they launch their website, only to find that no-one is visiting it. Sometimes established sites are performing online, just not well enough. And if you are thinking of ditching that old site and shelling out for a sparkly new one, have you considered what effect that might have on your online presence? Each of these scenarios requires a different approach, and while the basics of SEO remain the same, no two websites need exactly the same treatment.
SEO Basics
There are some SEO basics that can give your site a boost
- Don’t expect too much too soon
If you have a new domain, you will have to wait almost a year before it shows up in Google for a keyword search (due to their aging delay). SEO takes time.
- Optimise for people, not programmes
Your target audience will search using the relevant keywords – make sure that your pages give your audience what they want, and search engines will be happy too.
- Research your keywords well
Knowing what your customers are actually searching for, not what you think they might be searching for, will help your website get in front of the right people.
- Make your site ‘spider friendly’
While spiders are clever programmes, there are things they can’t do – understand images, Flash, fill in forms etc. By making your site as spiderable as possible, the more accessible it is to search engines and the more likely it is that it will rank well.
- Get your title tag right
Title tags are one of the most important parts of a web page – it tells both spiders and users what the page is about. Make sure that your keyword phrases are in your title tag to boost relevancy – and make sure that it reflects the content of the page.
- Write good quality content
Search engines need to understand what your site is about, so they need to contain text which is relevant to the products and/or services they sell. Quality, relevant content is one of the most important things a site can have in order to succeed.
- Make your website worth linking to
If your website doesn’t offer something interesting, then no-one will link to it. Essentially, if lots of good quality sites link to yours, it signals to search engines that your site is valuable, making that link a 'yes' vote for your site. It makes sense that the more sites that link to yours, the more popular it is in the eyes of search engines.
- Getting internal linking right
Ensuring that your site has good internal link structure ensures that it will get spidered properly, will build the relevancy of the page and increase the number of back links to your own pages.
Tools to use
- Keyword analysis tool Yahoo [1] Go to section marked 'tools' and click on 'keyword assistant' and then on view bid tools to see what their cost per click is per search phrase. The keyword assistant results shown represented around 12-20% of the total UK search market for that specific search phrase.
Recommended resources
Search Guru Danny Sullivan’s site: Daggle.com
Google engineer Matt Cutts’s blog: MattCutts.com
The official Google blog: GoogleBlog
Precision Marketing up to date media and marketing news: PrecisionMarketing.co.uk
Search news blog with Danny Sullivan, Chris Sherman, and Barry Schwartz providing information about search engine marketing: SearchEngineLand.com
The original search marketing resource site: SearchEngineWatch.com
MSN’s Windows Live search Blog: LiveSearch
Yahoo’s official search blog: YSearch
Online marketing and e-commerce news and information: E-Consultancy.com
Forum covering search engine news: WebmasterWorld.com
Daily search marketing news: AmberGreen.co.uk
