Search engine optimisation (SEO) is the name given to all of the activities involved in making a web site rank higher in the search engines for a given set of keywords. For example, if you sell overseas property then you would want to rank highly for the word 'property' plus all of the locations where you had some property to sell. E.g. 'property france' or 'property berlin'.
You might also want to rank for terms like 'apartment near golf course portugal' or '4 bedroom villa near Disneyland' and many others.
Before I go on, for reasons I can only guess at, there are more myths, cowboys, bad guys in black hats and egos operating in the SEO marketplace than in the entire back catalogue of films of John Wayne, Clint Eastwood and Slim Pickens! I hope this article helps you at least understand the difference between the good, the bad and the ugly!
And it sometimes seems amazingly hard to persuade companies to invest in SEO considering that search engines can deliver a raw, unfiltered pipeline of unmet customer requirements actively looking for a particular product or service (or at least expressing a problem.) To continue the western theme, you can lead a horse to water..
Look just tell me how to get to No 1 on Google!
OK I will tell you as quickly as I can. Google is very clever at crawling (reading), indexing (analysing and categorising) and ranking (putting in order of relevance to the typed in keyword) web pages.
To do so it has to trawl billions of web pages, categorise them and then assemble them in order. And to do so all it has are the pages themselves, and all of the links between them. SEO is about making that task as easy as possible for Google. So by understanding how Google decides who is No 1, you can do those things.. right?
Unfortunately Google uses many, many factors in deciding what page is on top for which keyword. And some of those factors involve things apparently outside of your immediate control - like the age of your web site and the number of trusted, established web sites that link to yours. Indeed, it changes the weighting of these factors from time to time - sometimes dropping them altogether or thinking up new ones.
On the whole, however, these factors are well known - but the weighting of them is not. This list is one of many that is considered reasonably accurate.
That list is really long, is there a quick and dirty SEO short-cut?
Well yes there are a few short-cuts. Firstly, Google will happily sell you a place on the right side of the results page for any keyword you want (and the top too). It can get expensive though - especially for lots of keywords, so you will need deep pockets.
There are also some ways of cheating Google. These 'black hat' techniques are however fairly anti-social and dangerous - in the sense that Google is looking out for them and will punish you. Either way, they are not to be considered by any organisation wishing to maintain it's reputation. These are Google's Webmasters guidelines - which you should always adher to.
Thirdly, you can actually go to the trouble of building a really good web site full of interesting and unique fresh word-heavy content and have several compelling functions that people want to link their web site to. And then wait for everyone to notice in their own good time. Except that that isn't very quick.
Basic SEO techniques
Keyword research. Any basic SEO activity starts with understanding your target keywords. What terms - in what order - and in what combinations do you want to rank for? How often are they used and how much competition is there for each of them? You can use this keyword tool from Google to get approximate volumes for keywords.
Link building. Google highly weights the number of links to your web site from other sites that it trusts. The more closely related and the more 'trusted' (Wikipedia and the BBC are very trusted) the better. You can see how many links Google thinks you have if you use something called Google Webmasters Tools. A simpler view can be obtained from sites like Link Popularity. Link building is about getting more links and encouraging other sites to link to you. Not so easy for the BBC, but how about your friends, suppliers, partners and affiliates? SEO consultants often spend a lot of time building links. Buying links is now frowned upon by Google, but it still goes on and cannot be discounted as a valid method.
Keyword rich content. Google is simple in one way - people type in keywords to Google and Google attempts to give them a relevant list of search results. So it makes a lot of sense to use those target keywords more often than other words, Especially in titles, bold headings and on links (including menu links). But ignore any suggestions from SEO cowboys about 'keyword stuffing' and 'invisible text' - these techniques are basically both ineffective and dangerous.
Structure of your web site. Google - or searchers viewing a list of results in Google - prefer certain things that are inherent about the structure of your web site and it's URLs. This is where is gets a bit more complicated - but on the whole these basic points are important;
- Use human-readable (clean) URLs with keywords in (not codes and numbers). e.g. domain.com/property-france not domain.com/country.code=?11223
- Provide internal links between pages that share a theme. E.g. read this page about what is an SEO all rounder
- Put keywords on menus and links. E.g. Read about our search engine optimisation service not read about our SEO service here..
- Don't have menus and content that Google can not or will not index. For example, in Flash or JavaScript
Plenty of unique, fresh content. Google loves lots of new, non-duplicate content. Words, words and more words. The more the better. And the more you create the more different keywords you can rank for. Think Wikipedia! (Google loves Wikipedia!)
SEO is a process not a project. There are some things that you fix once and shouldn't need to return to. But there are many others that require steady chipping away at pretty much for the life of the web site. It is, however, worth it. There has never been an easier, cheaper way of reaching potential customers who are actually looking for you.
These basic techniques will get you started. To learn more about search engine optimisation contact us for a no-obligation conversation. We can provide quick fixes to some of it and long term strategies to address the rest.
Article by Jake Holloway
