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.
When we search for anything, up come the natural search lists. They’re in addition to the PPC lists. On the major Search Engines, you’ll see a box at the top, and a column down the right hand side. These are the paid adverts. The ‘natural’ listings are straight from the main index. They show sites listed in the order of importance and relevance – according to their algorithm.
Of course, we would like to be as high as possible on page one. We’re unlikely to get noticed if we’re number 8 on the tenth page! It’s impossible to know about all the SE’s rank determining factors. It’s not in the SE’s interest to tell people everything they do.
So, over the years a complete industry has grown up around this. On the one hand there are SE’s purposely filing a wide array of new patents. Causing much mystification about their methods! 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. 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’ SEO
This involves making your web pages ‘friendlier’ to the Search Engines. It involves ‘correctly’ configuring your web site. For instance: 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!
In reality, this is very easy to control, but not wildly effective. Some would argue its effect is so small it’s irrelevant. There was a time when SE’s were ‘duped’ by On-Page optimisation. Not any longer though.
On-Page can still be important though if Off-Page has been taken care of. If that’s the case, internal linking and a certain amount of on-page fine-tuning can reap rewards.
Things To Consider…
Avoid doing SEO on keywords that have millions of listings. 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.
However… When I search for “Southampton Car Insurance”, it comes down to a more manageable 300K. (If car insurance in Southampton was my business!) A big number still it seems – but actually quite a small number when it comes to web searches.
I would have a far better chance of getting ranked for that phrase quickly than I would for just ‘car insurance’. In actual fact, it takes very deep pockets to get a premier listing for a term like ‘car insurance’. My competition would be the huge corporations. So not a great idea – especially, in fact, when there are much better ways to go about it.
We should concentrate on more accurate ‘phrases’ that give us less competition. These ‘long tail’ phrases might contain a number of specific keywords. They could be anything from two to seven words in length. Typically they will be 3 or 4 words long.
In general, our recommendation is to begin SEO’ing with keyword phrases that reveal fewer than 500,000 results. (There are occasions when we might accept a higher yield figure at the start – when the top entries are not well optimised.) Then, as we build back-links, we’ll automatically start to gain some ground on the bigger search phrases. If we’ve worked well, we can start hitting the bigger terms in a few months time. 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. Google and the other Search Engines like this ‘deep linking’. Try back-linking product group pages. They often have links to several other sub-pages about individual products. So don’t limit the back links to one page. Google and the other SE’s are looking more and more at how individual pages on your site are listed and treated.