Search Engine Optimisation Simplified
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.
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.
Nevertheless, an entire industry has evolved around Search Engine listings. So there are the Search Engines busily working on new systems on one side. This causes mass confusion over which methods they use for ratings. And to rival that, we have a large Search Engine Optimisation sector. This involves measuring various factors and doing empirical tests to establish the most important ones to target.
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.)
Search Engine Optimisation ‘On-Page’
It’s possible to change the pages of your website to make them ‘friendly’ to the Search Engines. It’s not too complex – it just requires setting your website up the right way. For instance: Utilising H1 and H2 Header Tags, Internal Linking, Keywords and Meta Tags.
Don’t worry if you don’t understand the technical terms. In reality, this is very easy to control, but not wildly effective. To be fair, it’s generally assumed now to have very little import indeed. Previously we could make an impact with On Page configurations. But that door has been completely closed down for several years now.
The only time that ‘on-page’ becomes important is when you have taken care of ‘off-page’ and have a lot of inbound ‘back-links’. At that stage, Internal Linking and some On Page manipulation can be beneficial.
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 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.
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!
Your home page isn’t the only place for back-links. Spread them liberally around your website. This technique is referred to as Deep Linking. For example, build links to the pages that group products. They often have links to several other sub-pages about individual products. Don’t just create back-links to your home-page. The SE’s are becoming increasingly interested in how a site’s individual pages are listed.