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.
We want to be right up there where we can be seen. Nobody will know we’re there if we’re way down on page eight! It’s impossible to know about all the SE’s rank determining factors. They don’t want us to know.
As a result, we now have a very skilled bunch of professionals focused on optimisation. And so we have on one side Google and Bing purposely patenting different technologies. (Which leads to much confusion of course!) Then to challenge that on the other hand is a growing SEO (optimisation) sector. This uses empirical testing and measuring of various factors to determine which ones are the most important.
There are two sides to SEO: ‘On-Page’ factors & ‘Off-Page’ factors. Additionally, demographics have an influence, but SEO doesn’t cover off-web factors. (We will cover off page optimisation in a separate article.)
On Page Optimisation
On-Page SEO is all about changes you can make directly to a site to make it more Search Engine ‘friendly’. This is actually a fairly clear-cut process. Factors like: 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! 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.
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’. In that circumstance, some On-Page tweaks and internal links can have an impact.
A Few Handy Pointers… Do not START to SEO with phrases that yield millions of results. 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 not rocket science to realise that competing in this area wouldn’t be productive.
But… A much smaller list (300k) comes up when I enter ‘Southampton car insurance’. (Which could be useful if I sold car insurance in Southampton!) This still seems quite a large amount, but it’s actually not in search terms.
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 prefer to begin optimisation strategies with phrases that bring in less than five hundred thousand results. Occasionally we’ll accept bigger numbers, but only if the results at the top haven’t been optimised well. As time goes on, we’ll benefit from an automatic improvement on the bigger terms as well. We can go for some of those after several months if we’ve SEO’d well. A plan like this is more strategic to start with. We go for the phrases that people who are looking to buy would use.
It’s also useful and wise to build back-links to individual sub-pages on your website, not just your home page. We call this ‘deep-linking’ - and Google in particular likes this. Category or Product Group pages are a good example. These pages are usually linked to particular product pages. This means it can be very productive to drive search terms directly to them. So don’t limit the back links to one page. The SE’s are becoming increasingly interested in how a site’s individual pages are listed.
Copyright 2009 Scott Edwards. Navigate to Jason Kendall or www.evolvesem.co.uk.


































