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. These lists are the main results that are shown when you do a search. They’re different from the ads that companies have paid for. Pay Per Click adverts are generally sectioned off down the right hand side, with a couple across the top of the page. All the others are ‘naturally’ listed from the Search Engine’s index. Sites are graded by how relevant they are, and how important they are (according to the SE!).
Of course, we would like to be as high as possible on page one. A site that’s half way down page seven is unlikely to be bombarded with enquiries! No-one knows all the factors that Search Engines (SE’s) use to determine your rank. They don’t want us to know.
Because of this, much technical expertise has developed around the subject. And so we have on one side Google and Bing purposely patenting different technologies. (Which leads to much confusion of course!) On the other side you have an SEO industry. This involves measuring various factors and doing empirical tests to establish the most important ones to target.
SEO looks at two different aspects – one is Off Page and the other is On Page. In addition there are geographic and demographic factors, but SEO cannot control these. To understand factors relating to off-page, please see our additional editorial.
ON PAGE SEO Explained
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. It involves such factors as – Internal-linking, using H1 & H2 header tags, seeding keywords at the correct density (and in appropriate places,) and to some lesser degree, using meta-tags.
That might sound like gobbledy-gook, but don’t be alarmed! On-Page optimisation is now known to have the smallest affect on your page rank. In truth, many argue its relevance has disappeared altogether! In the past it was easy to affect Search Engines with on-page SEO. Not any longer though.
Having said that, if the website benefits from off page optimisation, then on page work should be looked at. When that’s happened, on-page factors can be optimised.
Things To Consider… A phrase that shows vast numbers of results should not be your first SEO target. ‘Car Insurance’ is a term to stay away from – unless you want to compete with 70,000,000 others! It’s not rocket science to realise that competing in this area wouldn’t be productive.
And Yet – When I search for “Southampton Car Insurance”, it comes down to a more manageable 300K. (If car insurance in Southampton was my business!) Though still large, this is a much more manageable figure.
Now my chances are significantly improved. In actual fact, it takes very deep pockets to get a premier listing for a term like ‘car insurance’. I would actually be competing with the insurance conglomerates! Which is really not a good idea.
It’s far better to choose phrases that are more specific to our offering. They’re known as long tail searches, because they’ll have several keywords. Phrases can be as many as seven words, depending on your competition. Generally we use 3 to 4 words.
We prefer to begin optimisation strategies with phrases that bring in less than five hundred thousand results. (In some cases, we may go with a higher count – if the current page 1 results are not well SEO’d.) We’ll automatically move up the ratings for the more popular search terms as we gain more back-links. If we’ve worked well, we can start hitting the bigger terms in a few months time. This strategy is also far more targeted at the start. 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. We call this ‘deep-linking’ – and Google in particular likes this. For example, build links to the pages that group products. That’s because pages like this generally have links to several individual pages. Do not simply build links to your website’s home page. Search Engines are increasingly focused on the individual pages within a website.
Copyright Scott Edwards 2009. Hop over to SEM Consultants or Click HERE.