Search Engine Optimisation (Part 1)

What is Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)?

Search engine optimisation is the process of optimising your website design and content to maximise a search engines ability to find your website against certain search terms. The better you optimise your website for a specific search term the higher up the search engine pages you will be found. It doesn’t cost anything to do it yourself, it just takes time and patience.

SEO Factors

Google for example has an ever changing algorithm (a mathematical calculation) with 100s’ of factors that determine where your website is listed against a certain search term. This algorithm is one of the webs’ mysteries, it constantly changes to ensure that your search term produces the best search results and that bogus websites don’t beat good and relevant websites to the top for your search term.

How do you optimise your website?

To optimise your own website you need to ensure your website is built to the latest web standards and that you create good quality, relevant and unique website content. A good website design will have SEO built into its coding and a good website will have relevant information on the website linked in a natural way, from related page titles to page descriptions to content titles and page content. It’s easy really – there are techniques to cheat your way to the top known as ‘Black Hat SEO’ but a word of warning ‘don’t cheat’ because the search engines will eventually find you and penalise your website to the depths of page 385 or just ban you outright. So;

Avoid outdated design techniques;

• Don’t use tables for layout
• Don’t design using html frames
• Don’t use Black Hat SEO

Ensure your site;

• Is built to the latest web standards
• Has good quality, relevant and unique website content

Link Authority

The quality of incoming links to your website is also important to your websites search engine rankings. You can liken this to a popularity contest. So in my case as a web designer if I can create an article with a unique angle on a new or popular technology, then get a top web magazine or top designer to link to my article. I would gain credibility by association, not only in human terms but in search engine terms. My website becomes popular, because a website that was already popular with a higher web domain authority chose to associate with my website.

Getting to number one on Google?

I find it hard to trust the statement from anyone who claims to be able to get you to number one on Google. Hold on, I could do it for you, but only on some obscure term that is not likely to be searched on, so you are bound to be number one for that. The more popular the search term the more competition there is for the top spot.

SEO success with paid for adverts?

I know I said before don’t cheat, but you can cheat in a fashion by by-passing the natural search results by paying the search engine company. All the major search engines have ‘Pay Per Click’ advertising, PPC is where you can pay for your website to appear in a search engine result based on how much you are willing to pay for a potential client to click on your advertising link, what search engines term a ‘sponsored link’. Like above, the more popular the search term the more competition there is for the top spot and so the more you would have to pay if someone clicked on your link.

How do you measure SEO success?

Firstly by an increase in website traffic and ultimately by an increase in profitable business generated by your website. Again with Google, you can use Google Analytics to determine the performance of your site, if the increase in web traffic doesn’t give you more business then you need to look again at your website.

Conclusion

I have only glimpsed at the topic of SEO, you probably wouldn’t have read this far if it wasn’t of interest or important to your own website. So to summarise; Design a W3C standards compliant site with interesting, unique and relevant content. Ensure your page title matches your page description and that they both match your heading titles and content, with a consistent use of keywords, phrases and terminology. Ask other sites with a higher domain authority to link to you. Be patient and keep the content coming because on the web ‘Content is king’. Finally, don’t use black hat SEO, I haven’t discussed it in any detail in this article because it’s bad practice.

This article is also available on Limousin Life Magazine