Just a bit about search engine optimization.

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.

When we search for anything, up come the natural search lists. They’re in addition to the PPC lists. On the major Search Engines, you’ll see a box at the top, and a column down the right hand side. These are the paid adverts. The ‘natural’ listings are straight from the main index. They show sites listed in the order of importance and relevance – according to their algorithm.

We want to be right up there where we can be seen. No-one’s going to find us if we’re listed on page seven. It’s impossible to know about all the SE’s rank determining factors. 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. On the one hand there are SE’s purposely filing a wide array of new patents. Causing much mystification about their methods! On the other hand, there’s Search Engine Optimisation. This utilises a series of tests and measurements to determine the most pertinent factors.

There are two sides to SEO: ‘On-Page’ factors & ‘Off-Page’ factors. Geography and demography are also factors that influence page ranking. For a full discussion of Off-Page factors, please refer to our other article on this subject.

On Page Optimisation

This involves making your web pages ‘friendlier’ to the Search Engines. This is quite straight-forward – it simply requires correctly setting up your site. For instance: Seeding keywords in suitable places and at the correct density; internal-linking, using H1 & H2 header tags, and to a lesser extent, using meta-tags.

It doesn’t matter if all that sounds very confusing.

In reality, this is very easy to control, but not wildly effective. Some would argue its effect is so small it’s irrelevant. There was a time when SE’s were ‘duped’ by On-Page optimisation. Not any longer though.

On-Page can still be important though if Off-Page has been taken care of. When that’s happened, on-page factors can be optimised.

Things To Consider…

Avoid doing SEO on keywords that have millions of listings. 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.

On the other hand… A much smaller list (300k) comes up when I enter ‘Southampton car insurance’. (Assuming I was a car insurance provider in Southampton.) So a much more realistic target.

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’. My competition would be the huge corporations. 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. These ‘long tail’ phrases might contain a number of specific keywords. They could be anything from two to seven words in length. Typically they will be 3 or 4 words long.

In general, our recommendation is to begin SEO’ing with keyword phrases that reveal fewer than 500,000 results. (There are occasions when we might accept a higher yield figure at the start – when the top entries are not well optimised.) Then, as we build back-links, we’ll automatically start to gain some ground on the bigger search phrases. If we’ve worked well, we can start hitting the bigger terms in a few months time. 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. Google and the other Search Engines like this ‘deep linking’. Category or Product Group pages are a good example. These pages are usually linked to particular product pages. This means it can be very productive to drive search terms directly to them. Don’t just create back-links to your home-page. How your site’s pages are managed and listed is gaining more and more attention from Google, Bing and Yahoo.