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. When we search for anything, up come the natural search lists. They’re different from the ads that companies have paid for. The PPC (paid) entries tend to feature at the top and right side of the page. Whereas the free listings are taken from the main index. The Search Engines look at a site’s relevancy and value when establishing its position in the hierarchy.
Clearly, the goal is to get to the top of the page. A site that’s half way down page seven is unlikely to be bombarded with enquiries! Nobody can be entirely certain about which factors Search Engines use in their ranking process. They keep it a closely guarded secret!
Because of this, much technical expertise has developed around the subject. On the Search Engine side you have upgraded technological patents being regularly filed. (To cause as much uncertainty as possible!) And then you have an industry built around SEO. This involves measuring various factors and doing empirical tests to establish the most important ones to target.
On-Page and Off-Page considerations are taken into account. There are also ‘off-web’ factors such as demographic and geographic information – but we have no control over this area. For a full discussion of Off-Page factors, please refer to our other article on this subject.
On Page Optimisation
It’s possible to change the pages of your website to make them ‘friendly’ to the Search Engines. This website configuration is fairly simple. For instance: Seeding keywords in suitable places and at the correct density; internal-linking, using H1 & H2 header tags, and to a lesser extent, using 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. Many years ago, you used to be able to dupe the SE’s with lots of on-page factors. However, those days are long gone.
There’s only one reason today for on page optimisation, and that’s to maximise in-bound back-links. Then it’s worthwhile to manipulate your web pages and have some internal links.
Things To Consider… Keywords and phrases that bring up massive results should be avoided by anyone new to SEO. The phrase ‘car insurance’ yields 70,000,000 results in the United Kingdom alone! Anyone can see it’s not wise to try and compete with 70 million other pages when you’re just starting out!
On the other hand… 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). So a much more realistic target.
The extended phrase makes all the difference. In actual fact, it takes very deep pockets to get a premier listing for a term like ‘car insurance’. The competition would be fierce. 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. In Search Engine terms, these phrases (which can have a number of keywords) are referred to as long-tail. If your market’s very competitive, you could be selecting seven word phrases. Generally we use 3 to 4 words.
We like to start Search Engine Optimisation using terms that yield less than 500K. (If the sites on the front page haven’t used SEO techniques, then we might go with bigger yields). We’ll automatically move up the ratings for the more popular search terms as we gain more back-links. If we put in enough effort, we can go after those big phrases in 3-12 months time. A line of attack like this makes business sense. We’re after the people who are really looking to buy, so we go for phrases that convert well.
Your home page isn’t the only place for back-links. Spread them liberally around your website. The Search Engines like this – especially Google. A good example would be product group or category pages. These may contain links to many individual product pages, so it’s worth driving appropriate search terms to them. And so remember not to confine your back-links to the Home Page. The managing and listing of individual sub-pages is receiving growing attention from the major Search Engines.
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