Search Engine Optimisation or SEO is a process of
increasing your web site's visibility in web search engines
(for example Google, Yahoo, MSN etc). Ideally your web site
should appear on the first two pages of the search engine
results for relevant keyword searches; studies show that
most people never click past page two of search engine
results.
What Is Involved In SEO?
Broadly speaking, there are two main areas of search engine
optimisation; on-page SEO and off-page SEO. Both are
necessary to ensure you get good search engine placements
for your web site.
On-page search engine optimisation techniques involve
choosing the right keywords for your web site and including
these in the text that appears on your web site. The way a
web site is structured is also important so that a search
engine can easily read and index the content and know which
parts of the site are most important.
Off-page SEO refers to what can be done off the pages of
the web site to increase performance in the search engines.
It involves building links on other web sites that point to
the web site being optimised.
Keyword Analysis
The first step in optimising a web site for search engines
is to choose the right keywords. These need to be
appropriate for your products or services.
A good keyword or phrase is one that is not only relevant,
but there must also be enough people actually using that
term in their searches for it to boost web traffic.
Certain business areas are highly competitive, and
therefore getting good search engine positionings for
generic terms can be competitive too. It is often best to
identify niche keywords and phrases that better define the
product or service being offered. For example a company
offering a car valeting service in Southampton would find
it hard to achieve a good search engine placement for the
search term "car". In any case, most of the traffic
generated from this search term would not be relevant;
people would be looking for car sales, repairs and other
car-related services, not necessarily valeting. A more
sensible phrase to optimise for would be "car valeting
southampton".
High Quality Original Content
When search engines determine a web site's relevance for a
particular key phrase, one of the ranking factors they
employ is to examine the keyword density; how often a
particular search word or phrase appears on that page as a
percentage of the total number of words. Getting the
keyword density high enough ensures that the search engines
see the page as relevant for that phrase. Too many
occurrences of the term on the page, however, can lead to
penalisation, causing a fall in search engine placement.
Getting the balance right, therefore, is key to the success
of SEO.
Web pages need some pages of content to enable them to
contain keywords at the right density. It is best for this
content to be original because some search engines penalise
web sites that duplicate content from other sites.
Also important is reaching the right balance between search
engine optimised text and readability; too often optimised
pages are written almost entirely with the search engine in
mind with little regard for the human that will be reading
them.
The most successful SEO campaigns utilise frequent addition
of new content to web sites. This encourages search engines
to come back regularly to index new updates and helps to
give more importance to a site in a search engine's "eyes".
Web Site Structure
Correct structuring of a web page is essential to show
search engines which parts of the content are most
important. Proper use of hierarchical heading tags (h1, h2
etc.) and emboldened text is used to accomplish this.
The links between pages should be easy for search engines
to follow and should consist of text links rather than
image links where possible. Search engines can understand
text, allowing them to get some idea of what a page is
about just from the text links that point to that page.
Conversely, when images are used as links, a search engine
cannot glean any information about the page from the link.
Link Building
The number of other web sites linking to yours is one of
the main ways that search engines gauge the importance of
your site. These sites need to be on a similar topic as
your own and are best as one-way links rather than
reciprocal.
It is important to realise that the number of incoming
links your site has needs to grow organically. Search
engines look at the increase in links to your site over
time and give the best rankings to sites that show steady
growth, so this part of the search engine optimisation
process needs to be on-going.
It is important to realise that search engine optimisation
is a long term process and often takes up to six months
before results can be seen. If a more immediate return on
investment is required, then a Pay-Per-Click campaign can
be employed until the optimisation starts yielding results.
White-hat / Black-hat SEO Techniques
Many people use dubious techniques such as cloaking
(whereby a different version of a page is displayed to
humans than is shown to search engines), or hidden text
(where keyword rich text is hidden from human view by
colouring it the same as the background colour). Such
techniques can work in the short-term, but search engines
are continually getting cleverer in order to spot such
trickery. Web sites employing these methods are quickly
penalised when found out sending their traffic plummeting.
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Siris Digital offers web site design and development
services including search engine optimisation, web hosting,
e-mail marketing, and banner advert design.
http://www.sirisdigital.com
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