SEO - what? how? where?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation, it is the art of getting your website to be understood and rated better by search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN.

If your website has good SEO then your search engine ratings will improve, this will help visitors and potential customers find you, so it is a very cost effective marketing tool.

There are other ways to get your site a good listing on search engines, but you have to pay for the privilege, this is called pay per click advertising. When you do a search on google it’s the adverts that usually appear on the right hand side of the page. Every time someone clicks on your advert you pay an agreed price. It can become an expensive way of advertising your website because the competition is huge. Last time we checked out how much it would cost to get an advert displayed when the phrase web design was searched for it cost in excess of £6 per click!

If you get you SEO right you shouldn’t have to worry about pay per click advertising because customers will be finding you through search engine listings.

Make SEO an important factor in your marketing strategy, your customers are using search engines all the time to find products and services, make sure you are doing all you can to help people find you!

I am going to give you a very simple explanation of how a search engine works to help you understand how a search engine thinks! Sorry if it gets a bit technical!

A search is performed – this gets sent over to a massive bank of computers called index servers. Index servers are where search engines keep all the information they gather on the internet, this means they don’t actually go and look at each and every live website, they have versions of every website out there saved on their own bank of computers – this means they can do searches in millionths of a second. Once the query has been sent to the index servers it gets passed through the doc servers, which send back the results to the user in a meaningful way, rating them in order of importance. It is all designed to work as fast as possible, and to return you meaningful and useful results for your searches. That, in a nutshell, is how a search engine works!

I want to tell you a little bit about spiders! Not the creepy crawlies but the little programs search engines use to populate the index servers. A spider will visit your website roughly once a month, although if you have a website that has content updated daily, like a newspaper, spiders could visit two or three times a day or more! When the spider visits your site it will strip out all the frills and go straight for the heart of the code, it is really important to build a website so that it can be easily read by spiders.

When you build a website SEO should not be built in as an afterthought – it’s a crucial part of getting your website out there and encouraging more visitors to your site so it should be the first thing to think about when you build your website, so many times I have people approaching me asking me to do SEO on their websites, and after the site has been built it is often a much bigger job than if it had been built into the site in the first place.

Research words that are associated with your business, research things people would type into a search engine to find your business or service, these are vitally important to use throughout your site to help validate your site to those pesky spiders!

Inside the code of every page there should be some invisible code called meta tags and descriptions, each page of your website should contain no more than 12 unique keywords relevant to that particular page and one meta description consisting of a descriptive sentence about that page containing no more than 24 words. Again this is good spider food! Its also really important to have good and descriptive page titles, this is the phrase that appears along the top bar of your browser, most times you won’t even notice its there but spiders love these too! If you get all of these elements right you will be giving the spiders a good feast!

Populate your web site with rich and meaningful content. Search engines work with something called a word cloud. They take the content of your website and list each word inside it in order of importance, the more instances there are of a word, the more importance the search engine will give it. However you have to be careful because you can’t simply cut and paste the word over and over again, the spiders will think you are taking the piss and spamming them! And your visitors will not stay long either, as it doesn’t make for great reading! If you populate your site with rich and meaningful content you should naturally be using your keywords in a healthy manner! I have noticed that web sites with excellent ratings seem to use their most popular keywords about 4% within the text of their page.

Add useful content and articles to your website and make sure you add content to your site regularly to keep the spiders interested! Useful content can include articles which will be of interest to your visitors, for example an accountants website would have articles on tax tips, articles on business tips, articles on business funding etc things that would not only help your search engine validation but your customers too!

Links going to your website from other websites are really valuable, the more external links you can get to your website the better, the better quality the website is that is linking to you the better as well, it is proof to the search engines that you have a web site that is worth linking to! Links going from your website to other websites are not so important unless you are using them as reciprocal links, ie I’ll link to you if you link to me! Be careful though not to link to websites that have a blacklisting on Google such as scam sites or poorly rated sites.

One way of getting links back to your website is to use social networking sites like facebook, stumbleupon, linkedin or ecademy, these websites allow you to have a profile page that you can put information about yourself or your company on and you can put a link to your website from there too, there are many, many social networking sites out there to use. Another thing to do is open yourself a free blogging account on one of the popular blog sites, and blog! Link back to your website in the signature of your blog, use the articles you’ve written for your web site as blogs, get creative!

Be proactive get your site indexed on google and yahoo by submitting it to them if its not already on there, its easy to do you just visit the search engine and follow the instructions, don’t sit around hoping the spiders will find you one day! Go spider hunting! List your business on google maps and yahoo local, this is an extremely powerful thing to do as not a lot of people know about this yet so it gives you instant search engine success for local searches. Its simple to do and free, so you may as well go for it.

There is a special search engine called dmoz which is built by people not spiders, it’s a very valuable inbound link to have so it is worth visiting and following the instructions to get your website listed on there. Again not many people know the importance of dmoz so it is well worth doing it to give your self the edge. www.dmoz.org

Hopefully this has been a useful introduction to the vast world of SEO, you have to look at it as a bit of a hobby, it requires patience and planning. Have fun and experiment with it, one day if you keep at it you will realise you’ve risen to the top of the pile!