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Search Engine Optimisation is an ever changing discipline. It works to maximise a website’s ratings on the ‘natural’ search lists on major Search Engines. Natural or ‘organic’ lists form the main body of a SE page. These do not include the paid listings. The PPC (paid) entries tend to feature at the top and right side of the page. Whilst the other free ads have been listed by the SE’s. The order of each site is determined by its ‘importance’ and relevance to the keyword.

Obviously, we want to be as high up the page(s) as possible. 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!

But there is now a skilled sector entirely devoted to benefiting from high rankings. On the Search Engine side you have upgraded technological patents being regularly filed. (To cause as much uncertainty as possible!) And to rival that, we have a large Search Engine Optimisation sector. Optimisation specialists test, quantify and evaluate a myriad of indicators that affect a site’s ratings.

Search Engine Optimisation deals with both on-page and off-page issues. In addition there are geographic and demographic factors, but SEO cannot control these. (Off-Page optimisation is examined in an additional feature.)

SEO ‘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. Doing things such as: Keyword seeding (in the right places and the right amounts), using H1 and H2 header tags (and to some extent meta-tags) and internal linking.

Which may well sound like a foreign language to you! For the most part, although this work isn’t complicated, its effects are minimal. In truth, many argue its relevance has disappeared altogether! Previously we could make an impact with On Page configurations. That hasn’t been possible for a long time though.

If, however, off-page has been optimised, (and there are many inbound back-links), then on-page continues to be important. At that stage, Internal Linking and some On Page manipulation can be beneficial.

Some Words Of Caution… A phrase that shows vast numbers of results should not be your first SEO target. 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 fairly obvious that seventy million competitors is a few too many for someone just getting started.

And Yet – When car insurance is prefixed with ‘Southampton’, it becomes a less intolerable three hundred thousand. (Which could be useful if I sold car insurance in Southampton!) You might think that still sounds a lot, and yet it’s not in SEO terms.

I could expect to get ranked far more easily for the longer phrase. In reality, getting ranked for car insurance would cost a fortune! I’d actually be head to head with the really big boys. So not a great idea – especially, in fact, when there are much better ways to go about it.

Therefore, we’re looking for phrases that yield less overall results – but quite accurately sum up what we do or what we offer. These ‘long tail’ phrases might contain a number of specific keywords. They could be anything from two to seven words in length. Generally we use 3 to 4 words.

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. As time goes on, we’ll benefit from an automatic improvement on the bigger terms as well. And as our work makes progress, we’ll be onto the bigger terms a few months down the road. 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!

Don’t just limit building back links to your website’s home page – link them up to various sub pages as well. The Search Engines like this – especially Google. Category pages for instance are good to back-link. They very frequently link up to a range of sub-pages, so driving appropriate terms to them can be very worthwhile. Thus – don’t restrict the back links to just one page. The managing and listing of individual sub-pages is receiving growing attention from the major Search Engines.

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