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. ‘Natural’ search listings are the main lists of results that come up when you search for something. They’re in addition to the PPC lists. The PPC (paid) entries tend to feature at the top and right side of the page. All the others are ‘naturally’ listed from the Search Engine’s index. Search Engines use algorithms to determine a website’s relevancy and importance. This is how they decide on which order to place them in.

Clearly, the goal is to get to the top of the page. Nobody will know we’re there if we’re way down on page eight! No-one knows all the factors that Search Engines (SE’s) use to determine your rank. The SE’s really don’t want anyone to know – so you can’t manipulate or ‘game’ their system.

So, over the years a complete industry has grown up around this. And so we have on one side Google and Bing purposely patenting different technologies. Causing much mystification about their methods! And then you have an industry built around SEO. This uses empirical testing and measuring of various factors to determine which ones are the most important.

Both ‘off page’ and ‘on page’ optimisation is dealt with. There are also ‘off-web’ factors such as demographic and geographic information – but we have no control over this area. (We will cover off page optimisation in a separate article.)

SE ‘On Page’ Optimisation

On-Page SEO is all about changes you can make directly to a site to make it more Search Engine ‘friendly’. It involves ‘correctly’ configuring your website. For example: 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.

Don’t worry if you don’t understand the technical terms. In reality, this is very easy to control, but not wildly effective. To be fair, it’s generally assumed now to have very little import indeed. Previously we could make an impact with On Page configurations. But that door has been completely closed down for several years now.

If a site has a lot of in-bound back-links though, on-page factors can still be beneficial. If that’s the case, internal linking and a certain amount of on-page fine-tuning can reap rewards.

Suggestions To Take Into Account – Keywords and phrases that bring up massive results should be avoided by anyone new to SEO. Take car insurance for instance. In Britain alone you’d get seventy million sites listed. Far too much competition at the start.

However… If I typed in “Southampton Car Insurance”, then there are only around 300,000 results. (If car insurance in Southampton was my business!) So a much more realistic target.

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’. I’d be up against massive multi-nationals! Which is really not a good idea.

We should concentrate on more accurate ‘phrases’ that give us less competition. We call them Long-tail phrases, as they’re made up of a few particularly chosen keywords. If your market’s very competitive, you could be selecting seven word phrases. Typically they will be 3 or 4 words long.

In our opinion, phrases returning fewer than five hundred thousand results are a good start. (If the sites on the front page haven’t used SEO techniques, then we might go with bigger yields). As our back links increase, we’ll start to rate more highly on the bigger search terms as well. With some effort, it will be possible to have a stab at the big ones within a year. A line of attack like this makes business sense. Basically we zone in on people who are specifically searching to purchase.

Your home page isn’t the only place for back-links. Spread them liberally around your website. This technique is referred to as Deep Linking. For example, build links to the pages that group products. They often have links to several other sub-pages about individual products. Don’t just create back-links to your home-page. The SE’s are becoming increasingly interested in how a site’s individual pages are listed.

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