by Jason Kendall
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.
Plainly our aim is to get our site up with the top ones. We’re unlikely to get noticed if we’re number 8 on the tenth page! Only those in the Search Engine’s ‘inner circle’ know all the factors used to position sites. It’s not in the SE’s interest to tell people everything they do.
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.)
‘On-Page’ SEO
If we can make changes to our site to make it more friendly to Search Engines, this is called ‘on-page’ optimisation. This is quite straight-forward – it simply requires correctly setting up your site. It involves such factors as – Using internal links, keywords, header tags and meta tags.
Don’t worry if you don’t understand the technical terms. The bottom-line is, that while it is the easiest to control, it has the LEAST affect on your ranking. To be blunt, some would say it hardly has any effect at all. Search Engines used to credit on page factors in the past. Not any longer 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.
On the other hand… The phrase ‘Southampton Car Insurance’ only brings in three hundred thousand. (Assuming I was a car insurance provider in Southampton.) This still seems quite a large amount, but it’s actually not in search 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.
We should concentrate on more accurate ‘phrases’ that give us less competition. They’re known as long tail searches, because they’ll have several keywords. It depends on your competition, but long-tail searches can be up to 6 or 7 words. Usually, a long-tail phrase is three or four words.
It’s sensible to start SEO work on terms that yield under half a million returns. (If the sites on the front page haven’t used SEO techniques, then we might go with bigger yields). 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. A line of attack like this makes business sense. Basically we zone in on people who are specifically searching to purchase.
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.