What is Search Engine Optimisation?

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is the process of improving the visibility of a web site or a web page in search engines such as Google, Bing and many others.

For the uninitiated, SEO can become very confusing rather quickly. The good news is it that doesn’t have to be. The basics of SEO are actually quite easy to understand.

Firstly, you must understand that SEO is a subset of marketing. It should fit into your overall marketing plan and not be your marketing plan. If you market your business well, some of the more difficult parts of SEO will take care of themselves.

SEO is a constant process. Results should be measured and benefits of different approaches enhanced . It is not possible to optimize a site in a day or month. As with traditional methods of marketing, SEO continues and evolves with your business.

SEO can be generally categorized into 5 different aspects:

• Keyword research
• Search engine friendly site development
• On-page SEO
• Link Building
• Analytics

Each aspect is important, as together they form the basis of an effective SEO campaign.

Keyword Research

Everyone would like their pages to rank #1, but what should you be ranking for? Some keywords are more powerful than others and more likely to lead to a sale. The trick with keywords is not to spread your site too thinly, you do not need to optimize for every possible keyword or phrase; the trick is to identify the keywords that best fit your products or business.

The first step in developing a keyword list is brainstorming. Take some time and write down as many words and phrases as you can think of that relate to your site, with the understanding that this is simply the start of your research. You should be able to build a list of 50 – 100 phrases without much trouble.

Brainstorming will only yield so many keywords so your next step should be to expand your list with some keyword tools:

• Google AdWords Keyword Tool
• SEO Book Keyword Tool
• WordTracker
• Keyword Discovery

Search engine friendly site development

Now this is where you will require a responsible development company (such as ZeroDotNine!). When your website is built there will be a number of best practices that should be actioned to provide basic search engine visibility ‘out of the box’. These include:

• Non-duplicate content
• Permanant redirects on multiple domain names
• Search friendly URLs
• Correct use of on page SEO
• Sitemap
• Fast (yes, speed is now ranked!)

If you have an existing site that is performing poorly a quick glace at the source code can often bring to light a number of SEO and coding mistakes.

On-Page SEO

Once upon a time people stuffed keywords everywhere they could and their pages ranked in the search engines. Then along came a hobbit that considered all that keyword stuffing was spam. Now the SEO kingdom no longer works as it once did. Today the idea is to write page content so that it reads well to real people. You also want to pay attention to a couple of key things.

• Correct use of <h1>, <h2> and <h3> heading tags
• Page titles
• Image alt tags and links titles
• Text navigation links (not flash or images)
• Relevant meta information (keywords, descriptions and robots)

Ultimately when writing page content it’s far more important to think about how well the content reads to real people than search engines. Think about why you want the page to rank in the first place. It’s so someone landing on it will absorb your content and take some action. So what of the page ranks well if it reads so poorly that people leave instantly.

Link building

Links more than anything will determine where your pages rank. If you build a search friendly site and generate incoming links to your pages you’e going to get search traffic. The best way to think about links is as a recommendation or vote for your website. The more links you have from outside sources to your site the more the information is seen as trusted.

In google, the value of a link is decided by Page Rank (PR). This is Google’s way of measuring authority. The PR of a web page is based on the PR of the pages linking to that page. However PageRank isn’t the end all and be all of search ranking, if you’re chasing PR you’re going about things the wrong way. PR is only one factor among hundreds and it’s also a Google specific measure, it does not reflect on how well your pages rank in any other search engine.

So what are the best links to get? It depends on the topic of your site and the competition around that topic. Links from the Wikipedia and the BBC are always going to be reat, however the link from the authority in your niche is probably even better.

Trusted, authority sites probably aren’t going to link to you just because you ask. You’re generally going to need to give them a reason to link to you. That starts with your own content. The better your content the more likely someone will want to link to it.

Always remember that you have to give to get. When you support other businesses it makes it easier to help you back. Think about how you can help the site you’re hoping will link back to you, build relationships and network with other businesses.

Adding a links page to your site as an area to trade links with other sites in your business sector is a great way to generate links and publishing blog posts to sites such as delicious and digg can move traffic to your site.

Analytics

How do you know if your SEO is working? Analytics allow you to know if your efforts are successful and leading to a positive return on your investment.

There’s no excuse not to have analytics set up on your site. Google Analytics is free, easy to set up, and most importantly offers some good statistics to help you understand what’s happening with your website.

You can see how much traffic you’re receiving from search engines and other sources and set goals to Ideally your traffic will continue to grow, but if it doesn’t or if you notice you’ve suddenly lost a lot of traffic you can begin to look deeper to understand why.