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The ever developing skill of learning how Search Engines position sites on their organic search listings is known as Search Engine Optimisation. When we search for anything, up come the natural search lists. They are not to be confused with the Pay per Click entries. Pay Per Click adverts are generally sectioned off down the right hand side, with a couple across the top of the page. Naturally listed adverts have been taken directly from the index. Algorithms are used to determine the position of a web site in a Search Engine directory.

Of course, we would like to be as high as possible on page one. No-one’s going to find us if we’re listed on page seven. It isn’t possible to say for certain exactly which measures SE’s use to grade sites. The SE’s really don’t want anyone to know – so you can’t manipulate or ‘game’ their system.

As a result, we now have a very skilled bunch of professionals focused on optimisation. On the Search Engine side you have upgraded technological patents being regularly filed. (To cause as much uncertainty as possible!) On the other hand, there’s Search Engine Optimisation. This utilises a series of tests and measurements to determine the most pertinent factors.

Search Engine Optimisation deals with both on-page and off-page issues. A certain amount of page ranking weight can be attributed to off web geographic influences. SEO can’t control these though. (We will cover off page optimisation in a separate article.)

‘On-Page’ SEO

Adjusting a site’s content to make it friendlier to the SE’s is called On Page optimisation. This is quite straight-forward – it simply requires correctly setting up your site. Factors like: The correct use and density of keywords and internal linking; H1 and H2 header tags and meta tags.

Which may well sound like a foreign language to you! On-Page optimisation is now known to have the smallest affect on your page rank. To be blunt, some would say it hardly has any effect at all. In the past it was easy to affect Search Engines with on-page SEO. But that’s no longer the case.

On-Page can still be important though if Off-Page has been taken care of. Then it’s worthwhile to manipulate your web pages and have some internal links.

Take Counsel – Avoid doing SEO on keywords that have millions of listings. ‘Car Insurance’ is a term to stay away from – unless you want to compete with 70,000,000 others! Anyone can see it’s not wise to try and compete with 70 million other pages when you’re just starting out!

But… Extend the phrase to Southampton car insurance and it’s under a third of a million. (Relevant if that’s the locality I work in). This still seems quite a large amount, but it’s actually not in search terms.

The extended phrase makes all the difference. In reality, getting ranked for car insurance would cost a fortune! The competition would be fierce. Not a sensible option for anyone.

In fact, what we really need are terms that more specifically reflect our product or service. In Search Engine terms, these phrases (which can have a number of keywords) are referred to as long-tail. Depending on how competitive your market is, the phrases could be from 2 to 7 words long. 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. (If the sites on the front page haven’t used SEO techniques, then we might go with bigger yields). Then, as we build back-links, we’ll automatically start to gain some ground on the bigger search 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. 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!

It’s a good idea to spread the back-links around your website. Limiting them to the home page is unwise. We call this ‘deep-linking’ – and Google in particular likes this. Try back-linking product group pages. They very frequently link up to a range of sub-pages, so driving appropriate terms to them can be very worthwhile. So don’t limit the back links to one page. Bing, Yahoo and Google are all paying more attention to the way a website’s pages are managed and listed.

(C) Jay Kendall. Hop over to EvolveSEM.co.uk for intelligent information on SEM Experts and SEO Experts.

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