Fundamentally, SEO is the study of how Search Engines organise sites on their organic search lists. These lists are the main results that are shown when you do a search. They are not to be confused with the Pay per Click entries. The paid listings are typically in a yellow section at the top of the page, and in a column down the right hand side. All the rest have naturally been put into position. The Search Engines look at a site’s relevancy and value when establishing its position in the hierarchy.

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.

Because of this, much technical expertise has developed around the subject. On the one side you have SE’s like Google deliberately filing technology patents in many different areas. This makes determining their ratings methods more complex. Then to challenge that on the other hand is a growing SEO (optimisation) sector. Optimisation specialists test, quantify and evaluate a myriad of indicators that affect a site’s ratings.

There are two sides to SEO: ‘On-Page’ factors & ‘Off-Page’ factors. In addition there are geographic and demographic factors, but SEO cannot control these. (Off-Page optimisation is examined in an additional feature.)

SEO ‘On-Page’

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.

If all that is complete double-dutch to you, then don’t worry – you’re not alone! It’s very easy to control on-page factors. But to be quite honest, they have the least relevance to your ranking these days. In truth, many argue its relevance has disappeared altogether! In the past it was easy to affect Search Engines with on-page SEO. That hasn’t been possible for a long time though.

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’. At that stage, Internal Linking and some On Page manipulation can be beneficial.

A Few Handy Pointers… Don’t try hugely listed phrases and keywords in your early attempts at Search Engine Optimisation. For instance, if you typed into a Search Engine the term Car insurance, seventy million results would be listed for the UK alone. That’s a huge number to pitch yourself against.

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’ve a much better chance in the rankings having added the word ‘Southampton’. 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. 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.

We like to start Search Engine Optimisation using terms that yield less than 500K. However, if the websites at the top of the listings aren’t well optimised, we may stretch to a higher count. We’ll automatically move up the ratings for the more popular search terms as we gain more back-links. Assuming everything goes to plan, we’ll hit the popular phrases in three to twelve months. This is a nicely targeted approach. We’re looking for people who want to buy, so we use terms with a commercial intention!

Back Links should be shared between several web pages on your site and not just restricted to the Homepage. We call this ‘deep-linking’ – and Google in particular likes this. Try back-linking product group pages. 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.