SEO is essentially a constantly evolving study of what factors the search engines take into account when they ‘rank’ you in their natural search listings. ‘Natural’ search listings are the main lists of results that come up when you search for something. They’re in addition to the PPC lists. The PPC (paid) entries tend to feature at the top and right side of the page. All the others are ‘naturally’ listed from the Search Engine’s index. Search Engines use algorithms to determine a website’s relevancy and importance. This is how they decide on which order to place them in.

Naturally our target is the top of the first page! We’re unlikely to get noticed if we’re number 8 on the tenth page! We can’t know for sure about all the criteria Google and the like use to rank us. They keep it a closely guarded secret!

Because of this, much technical expertise has developed around the subject. On the one side you have SE’s like Google deliberately filing technology patents in many different areas. This makes determining their ratings methods more complex. Then to challenge that on the other hand is a growing SEO (optimisation) sector. Optimisation specialists test, quantify and evaluate a myriad of indicators that affect a site’s ratings.

Both ‘off page’ and ‘on page’ optimisation is dealt with. There are also ‘off-web’ factors such as demographic and geographic information – but we have no control over this area. (We will cover off page optimisation in a separate article.)

Search Engine Optimisation ‘On-Page’

On-Page SEO is all about changes you can make directly to a site to make it more Search Engine ‘friendly’. It involves ‘correctly’ configuring your website. For example: Internal-linking, using H1 & H2 header tags, seeding keywords at the correct density (and in appropriate places,) and to some lesser degree, using 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 Few Handy Pointers… Don’t try hugely listed phrases and keywords in your early attempts at Search Engine Optimisation. For instance, if you typed into a Search Engine the term Car insurance, seventy million results would be listed for the UK alone. That’s a huge number to pitch yourself against.

But… When car insurance is prefixed with ‘Southampton’, it becomes a less intolerable three hundred thousand. (Only useful of course if these words describe my business.) This still seems quite a large amount, but it’s actually not in search terms.

I would have a far better chance of getting ranked for that phrase quickly than I would for just ‘car insurance’. In actual fact, it takes very deep pockets to get a premier listing for a term like ‘car insurance’. I’d be up against massive multi-nationals! Which is really not a good idea.

It’s far better to choose phrases that are more specific to our offering. In SEO terms, they’re referred to as Long Tail Searches, as they include several relevant words. It depends on your competition, but long-tail searches can be up to 6 or 7 words. They’re usually around three or four.

We like to start Search Engine Optimisation using terms that yield less than 500K. However, if the websites at the top of the listings aren’t well optimised, we may stretch to a higher count. We’ll automatically move up the ratings for the more popular search terms as we gain more back-links. Assuming everything goes to plan, we’ll hit the popular phrases in three to twelve months. This is a nicely targeted approach. We’re looking for people who want to buy, so we use terms with a commercial intention!

Back Links should be shared between several web pages on your site and not just restricted to the Homepage. We call this ‘deep-linking’ – and Google in particular likes this. Try back-linking product group pages. They very frequently link up to a range of sub-pages, so driving appropriate terms to them can be very worthwhile. Thus – don’t restrict the back links to just one page. The managing and listing of individual sub-pages is receiving growing attention from the major Search Engines.