Search Engine Optimisation(SEO)

What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?

Search Engine Optimisation or SEO can simply be described as the process of bringing greater numbers of ‘relevant’ visitors to your website via the natural or organic listings of the search engines. This definition highlights an important point:

• You can influence the amount and quality of traffic to your website. The ‘quality’ or ‘relevance’ of visitors is related to the keywords or key phrases they used in their search engine enquiry, and how your web page(s) relate(s) to those keywords, phrases and terms. Search engines however don’t judge web pages and deliver them as search engine results purely on relevance, although it is a highly important factor.

There are different types of search engine listings. Taking Google as an example, there are essentially 2 types of search engine listing – those you pay the search engines for and those you don’t:

1. The Pay-per-click (PPC) search engine listings involve bidding on the keywords and key phrases and using them to activate and display an advert / several adverts on the same page as the natural search engine results, and in other areas of web content depending on which PPC services you subscribe to. You then pay the PPC provider (Google in this case) only when your adverts are clicked on. The adverts link to a page within your website(s) known as a landing page. Although PPC is essentially a paid for service, and if you intend to operate your own PPC campaigns, it does actually require some awareness and knowledge of the concept and process of SEO in order to get the most out of it i.e. being able to optimize the landing page.

2. The natural listings / organic listings are the longest standing type of listing, and are what most people consider to be the search engine results. When a keyword or key phrase is searched for in a search engine the natural / organic listings appear on the left hand side of the page.

Why is it important to be in the natural listings?

There are several good reasons why you would benefit form having your web pages appear in the natural listings:

• The vast majority of search engine users click on the natural links as opposed to the PPC adverts / paid for links.

• Unlike pay-per-click advertising, you don’t have to pay the search engines to appear in the natural listings. Also, your web pages will remain in the natural listings as long as the pages fit the search engine guidelines, and also to an extent as long as you maintain and update your web pages, and ensure their continuing interest to web visitors, relevance and importance e.g. by adding to and updating the content, by accumulating and adding more incoming links.

Where pay-per click advertising is concerned, when you stop paying (and when the clicks on your PPC adverts have used up the daily budget) your adverts won’t appear in the search engine listings.

• Most long-term web users are used to looking first in the natural listings. The natural / organic listings have traditionally appeared on the left hand side of the page. They were there a long time before PPC adverts existed on the web.

• The Internet has traditionally supported a culture that is more resistant to most types of intrusive or distracting advertising. This is partly due to Internet users have long been plagued by e.g. spam, and all kinds of targeted or blanket advertising which has caused inconvenience and the need to take proactive and evasive action e.g. the use of spam filters and spam buttons on emails, pop-up blockers etc.

Spam has also often been linked with viruses. For this reason, advertising via the web is often treated with more scepticism, is perceptually ‘filtered out’, and is often avoided and ignored. Web users often prefer to make their own selections and choices, and therefore trust and reliability of websites is important. Web users have a general trust of the links shown in the natural listing of the search engines.

• Experiments with eye tracking and web pages have shown that in countries / cultures where there is left to right and top to bottom reading, web users view web pages in the same way – starting top left, and reading left to right down the page. The natural listings of the search engine results will naturally benefit, and therefore links to URLs (web page addresses) in the natural listings will be clicked on in larger numbers and more often than the PPC paid for adverts displayed on the left and near the top of the page.

• Many web users know that the pay-per-click adverts, although apparently relevant to your search in the adverts’ content, are in fact paid for adverts. Web users therefore tend to place greater trust in the natural listing because there is no perceived commercial motive.

About Search Engines

Finding anything specific on the web within a reasonable amount of time wouldn’t be possible without search engines, so accepting them as a necessity, and more importantly, as an immovable reality is important step in taking up the challenge of trying to ensure that your web pages rank highly in them for the desired keywords and key phrases.

Google has for a ling time (in Internet terms) been the most dominant search engine in terms of the number of users, market share, and consequently the amount of visitors it is likely to refer to your web pages. Search engines generally are likely to deliver approximately 80% of your web page visitors. Of this, Google is likely to, on average, be responsible for giving your web pages least 50% of their visitors. This figure is likely to be much higher in many cases, particularly if you are also operating a pay-per-click campaign.

In business terms, the market share of search engines has long shown a similar pattern although the figures have altered slightly. Google’s share is approximately 70%, with Yahoo around 15%, Bing around 10%, and Ask at around 2%. These Market share figures don’t correspond to the amount of people they will direct to your web pages. In percentage terms, whilst the Google figure will be similar, the closest search engines to Google in these terms for your web pages is likely to be e.g. Yahoo with a figure of 1% or 2% (from the natural listings referrals).

Geographic Differences

What you have read so far is based on the UK market – although it could be broadly applied to the U.S. and Europe. The market share and referral percentages shown above will be quite different though in some countries. For example, Russia, China, South Korea and the Czech Republic will be places where Google is not the most popular search engine. This is mainly due to the use of search engines local to those countries and / or political intervention, limitations on, and interference in Google’s operations.

Some Basic Terms

N.B. The terms ‘visits’ and ‘visitors’ are often applied to web pages because your pages are accessed by different types of ‘visitors’ e.g. software and search engine robots / bots / crawlers etc, as well as actual human visitors. For the purposes of this particular piece of writing, visitors will mean ‘human’ visitors.

Also worth noting at this point is that visitors sent to your web pages via search engines are sometimes referred to as ‘referrals’, and the search engines themselves as ‘referrers’. These may be terms you’ve observed for example in your web page statistics package.

Popular Misconceptions and SEO Myths

Here are some popular misconceptions and myths regarding the search engines, SEO, and getting your web pages higher in the search engine rankings. Any sound familiar?

• SEO is something I can’t do myself / only SEO companies can optimise my web pages successfully.
• SEO involves lots of technical knowledge, scripting and coding.
• SEO is a kind of secret art that only ‘techies’ or ‘nerds’ in-the-know can do.
• SEO companies add special codes to your web page that make them feature higher in the search engines.
• All SEO companies will charge lots of money, I will never know what they’ve done, and the likelihood is that it won’t work.
• The ‘Meta Tags’ are the most important factors in the ranking of a web page.
• I can improve my search engine rankings by linking to lots of other websites from my website.
• If I buy lots of links to my web pages, this will improve my search engine rankings.
• The more incoming links I have, the more my search engine rankings will improve.
• I shouldn’t have or need more than one website.
• Websites have to be big to be successful.
• If I add lots more pictures to my web pages, this will improve their ranking.
• I know without checking exactly what keywords and key phrases people are typing into the search engines to find products and services like mine.
• There are exact numbers and percentages of keywords you have to include in various parts of your web pages.

These and many more misconceptions often prevent people from learning a few relatively simple skills, tips and guidelines that could start improving their search engine rankings in a very small amount of time.

How Do Search Engines Work?

The exact workings of each individual search engine company are closely guarded commercial and technical secrets; however, here is a very brief and simplified overview of what a search engine e.g. Google does.

Relatively large numbers of computers and hardware at the search engine headquarters are used to search the web to bring back information about web pages. These computers and the software they use to gather the information are often referred to as robots / bots / crawlers etc. The information gathered is stored in the search engine database. The pages are organised, categorised and ranked according to a number of rules and factors (approximately 200 according to Google) that are incorporated into changing mathematical calculations (decision trees) called ‘algorithms’.

When we type a word or phrase into a search engine, we are given the ranked results from the search database based on these algorithms.

So How Are Web Pages Optimised / How is SEO Carried Out?

Downloading and changing a web page is only one part of Optimization, although in many cases that may be a good starting point. Getting many more high quality visitors to a web page may involve a combination of things such as distributing relevant content around the web which provides the right kind of links back to your web pages.

Since Google is by far the most popularly used search engine, and will refer the most visitors to your web pages, it could be argued that successful SEO involves making your web pages correspond to Google’s idea of what makes good web pages. In any case however, it’s important to remember that any search engine worth being listed in will rely heavily on the content of the pages to rank them.

The Importance of Keywords in SEO

Picking the right keywords and key phrases is central to successful SEO. It sounds simple, but whatever you really want, or more importantly need your pages to be listed and ranked for, actually needs to appear in those pages. Choosing the ‘right’ keywords will mean some degree of keyword research is necessary. Optimising a page for a keyword or key phrase that will attract very few visitors and / or have a great deal of competition among other pages is likely to be unsuccessful.

Keyword selector tools use recent data from search engines so they can tell you how often certain keywords and key phrases have been searched for, and give you an indication of the likely degree of competition. They can also highlight key phrases that could provide opportunities for you e.g. phrases related to a niche market that you are able to serve.

It is therefore very important to remember that people may not be using the keywords and key phrases that you think they’re using to try and find products, services, and companies like yours on the web. You need to firstly check ‘in reality’ what people are actually searching for. It is high risk strategy to base your online business (which may be the whole of your business and livelihood) on guesswork.

Look at Your your Web Pages from Other Points of View

Successful SEO will also mean that you will need to view your web pages from 2 points of view other than your own:

1. From the point of view of the search engine(s).
2. From the point of view of people using the search engine(s).

Search engines are commercial organisations funded mainly by advertising. They need customers to continue using their particular search engine instead of competing search engines. They also need to provide a good degree of satisfaction to users of the search engine to ensure that this keeps happening, and so they can keep receiving the advertising revenue. This means that they are more likely to try to produce results to search engine queries that will:

• Provide the best experience to their customers.
• Be reliable and trustworthy, and not deliberately deceptive or hold unpleasant surprises.
• Be highly relevant in terms of keywords, key phrases and associated meaning.
• Provide a good amount of unique and interesting text content.
• Be written primarily for people and not search engines.
• Be valued by other web users e.g. through linking.
• Provide a good degree of choice.

Search engines also have a high degree of experience in spotting and guarding against pages that employ ‘black hat’ SEO techniques. These are deliberately deceptive tactics e.g. keyword stuffing and cloaking. Even if some of these tactics work in the short term, you can fully expect pages to be penalised by the search engines depending on their extent and seriousness. Remember that part of the search engine’s job is also to provide a fairer environment for your own pages to compete in.

It is highly likely that search engine users / your potential customers would like search engine results that meet all of the criteria mentioned above, therefore it is important to make sure that your web pages meet these criteria.

Specific Search Engine Guidelines and Guidance

Despite the exact selection criteria and algorithms of the main search engines being secret, there are extensive published guidelines and resources on the web that if you read them and study them carefully i.e. read a little between the lines as well, can give you a good basic grounding in what particular search engines would prefer your web pages to be like (which could improve your pages rankings in those search engines). For example see Google’s guidelines and resources.

Changing Elements of Your Pages.

Very often, it is necessary to change various elements of your page content to make them more relevant to specific keywords and key phrases as far as the search engines are concerned. There are certain elements of web pages that are likely to have more of an effect on the ranking of a page than others. These have changed over time, and the ever changing nature of search engine algorithms means that there are gradual changes in these over time as the search engines compete against efforts to deceive and gain unfair advantage in them while still trying to deliver high quality search engine results according to their users.

Can Anybody Learn SEO?

Yes. If you have a computer, an Internet connection, and are prepared to spend a little time studying your own web pages, and comparing them to how the main search engines would prefer them to be in themselves and in terms of the quality of their links with other relevant pages, you can learn SEO to s good standard.

One of the easiest and safest ways to learn SEO is to contact a training company who have experience and knowledge in this area, are impartial and willing to pass on the key skills and knowledge to you in a clear, straightforward and non-technical fashion. Learning SEO yourself is an investment that can easily pay for itself in the short and medium term, and can make your online business much more competitive and profitable in the long term.

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