The Latest On Search Engine Optimisation
Monday, May 10th, 2010Fundamentally, SEO is the study of how Search Engines organise sites on their organic search lists. The natural listings form the main body of a Search Engine’s pages. Paid listings are separate to natural listings. In a typical Google or Bing search, you can see the paid listings in the right column and in the yellow box at the top. Naturally listed adverts have been taken directly from the index. They show sites listed in the order of importance and relevance – according to their algorithm.
Of course, we would like to be as high as possible on page one. If we’re the 7th listing on page 9 then we’re hardly going to get prospects beating our door down! We can’t know for sure about all the criteria Google and the like use to rank us. It isn’t something they publicise to the rest of us!
Nevertheless, an entire industry has evolved around Search Engine listings. So there are the Search Engines busily working on new systems on one side. Leading to great mystique over their ratings methodology. On the other side you have an SEO industry. Optimisation specialists test, quantify and evaluate a myriad of indicators that affect a site’s ratings.
There are two sides to SEO: ‘On-Page’ factors & ‘Off-Page’ factors. Additionally, demographics have an influence, but SEO doesn’t cover off-web factors. (We will cover off page optimisation in a separate article.)
On Page Optimisation
On-Page SEO is all about changes you can make directly to a site to make it more Search Engine ‘friendly’. This is actually a fairly clear-cut process. Factors like: The correct use and density of keywords and internal linking; H1 and H2 header tags and meta tags.
That might sound like gobbledy-gook, but don’t be alarmed! In reality, this is very easy to control, but not wildly effective. Indeed, it could be said to basically not have much influence at all. It used to be possible to ‘trick’ the Search Engines with on-page factors several years ago. But that’s no longer the case.
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.
A Few Handy Pointers… Do not START to SEO with phrases that yield millions of results. For instance, if you typed into a Search Engine the term Car insurance, seventy million results would be listed for the UK alone. It’s not rocket science to realise that competing in this area wouldn’t be productive.
But… A much smaller list (300k) comes up when I enter ‘Southampton car insurance’. (Which could be useful if I sold car insurance in Southampton!) This still seems quite a large amount, but it’s actually not in search terms.
We can do much more with this. Trying to get a ranking for CAR INSURANCE would take a huge amount of time and money. I’d actually be head to head with the really big boys. A bad move all round really.
Therefore, we’re looking for phrases that yield less overall results – but quite accurately sum up what we do or what we offer. In Search Engine terms, these phrases (which can have a number of keywords) are referred to as long-tail. If your market’s very competitive, you could be selecting seven word phrases. Generally we use 3 to 4 words.
In general, our recommendation is to begin SEO’ing with keyword phrases that reveal fewer than 500,000 results. However, if the websites at the top of the listings aren’t well optimised, we may stretch to a higher count. In time our back links will grow. Then we’ll get a better rating on some of the bigger yielding phrases. Assuming everything goes to plan, we’ll hit the popular phrases in three to twelve months. This strategy is also far more targeted at the start. We’re looking for people who want to buy, so we use terms with a commercial intention!
Your home page isn’t the only place for back-links. Spread them liberally around your website. The Search Engines like this – especially Google. A good example would be product group or category pages. These may contain links to many individual product pages, so it’s worth driving appropriate search terms to them. And so remember not to confine your back-links to the Home Page. The managing and listing of individual sub-pages is receiving growing attention from the major Search Engines.
Copyright Scott Edwards 2009. Try CLICK HERE or www.evolvesem.co.uk.
