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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.

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.

If all that is complete double-dutch to you, then don’t worry – you’re not alone! It’s very easy to control on-page factors. But to be quite honest, they have the least relevance to your ranking these days. In truth, many argue its relevance has disappeared altogether! In the past it was easy to affect Search Engines with on-page SEO. That hasn’t been possible for a long time though.

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 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.

The extended phrase makes all the difference. Trying to get a ranking for CAR INSURANCE would take a huge amount of time and money. My competition would be the huge corporations. Not the best way to do things at all!

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.

In our opinion, phrases returning fewer than five hundred thousand results are a good start. (If the sites on the front page haven’t used SEO techniques, then we might go with bigger yields). As our back links increase, we’ll start to rate more highly on the bigger search terms as well. With some effort, it will be possible to have a stab at the big ones within a year. A line of attack like this makes business sense. Basically we zone in on people who are specifically searching to purchase.

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.

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