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.

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! It’s impossible to know about all the SE’s rank determining factors. It isn’t something they publicise to the rest of us!

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.)

SE ‘On Page’ Optimisation

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. For instance: Utilising H1 and H2 Header Tags, Internal Linking, Keywords and Meta Tags.

That might sound like gobbledy-gook, but don’t be alarmed! Actually, though on page work is straightforward it probably accounts for little. In fact, it is widely believed that it has very little effect at all anymore. Search Engines used to credit on page factors in the past. That’s not how it is now 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 Bit of Advice… A phrase that shows vast numbers of results should not be your first SEO target. For example, on Google’s Search Engine you’ll see 70 million listings in the UK for the term Car Insurance. It’s not rocket science to realise that competing in this area wouldn’t be productive.

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!

It’s far better to choose phrases that are more specific to our offering. In SEO terms, they’re referred to as Long Tail Searches, as they include several relevant words. It depends on your competition, but long-tail searches can be up to 6 or 7 words. They’re usually around three or four.

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. Over time we’ll gain ground on the larger search terms. This will happen automatically through building back links. We can go for some of those after several months if we’ve SEO’d well. It’s a much more targeted strategy. 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 SE’s respond well to this. Category or Product Group pages are a good example. It’s worth driving specific search terms to these pages – they often have links to lots of other product pages. The home page shouldn’t be the only one to receive back-links. Bing, Yahoo and Google are all paying more attention to the way a website’s pages are managed and listed.