In today’s fastest growing online marketing era if you make sure that your website is search engine friendly, your site will rocket to the top of Google ranking or Google search. Here I will discuss the fundamentals of SEO and how to apply them in the real world, including a look at the latest trends and emerging search technologies.
Search Engine Optimization is becoming more and more important to every site. With more than 113 billion searches conducted in july 2009 alone, the volumes speak for themselves. Some of the techniques used have given SEO a bad names, but while there are many techniques that are less than honest, there are several simple ways to ensure your site benefits from natural search results. Search can be classified as either organic (natural) or paid. Organic results are those that occur naturally in search engine results pages and high results depend on both the technical constuction of your site and the content within it. Paid results, often referred to as Pay Per Click (PPC), are the results site owner pay for and which usually surround the organic listings. Research shows web users prefer organic listings to paid listings, considering them more relevant and trustworthy. The goal of SEO then, is to improve your organic listings performance which in turn should boost traffic to your site.
Natural Search
Search engines index the web using large clusters of computers, known as bots, which spider the web by following links found on the web pages. These URLs are populated into the search engine indexes and it’s this index that’s queried every time a user performs a search. Search engines employ complex mathematical equeations, known as ranking algorithms, to order search results. Google’s algorithm alone relies on more than 200 individual factors to decide which results, in which order, to return to its web searchers. Natural SEO can be further split into two categories:
- On page: The code and content you use to manage and deliver your web pages.
- Off page: External factors effecting SEO. This is primarily focused around link building – getting other websites to link to your content.
There are two ways to get discovered by search engines. One is to submit your site directly to their indexes like Google, Yahoo, Bing etc. The other is to wait for them to find it through links to you from other sites during theur crawling process. To make sure your website is accessible to search engine spiders (bots), follow these simple steps.
1. Ensure you are not preventing the search enginess indexing your site via The Robots (bots), Exclusion Protocol with use of a robots.txt file, which is used to give instructions to search engine bots.
2. Ensure your content is machine-readable. Avoid using Flash, video or imagery to exclusively house your content. Remember, search spiders cannot see images or video: they can only read written text on a web page.
3. Ensure you have a clear internal linking architecture. Promote important content to the home page and link to key site sections via dedicated navigation. Group content into clear site sections reflected in your site navigation to aid both users and search engines.
4. Eliminate duplicate content. This could be cuased by the way your server is set up or how your CMS serves up content. Either way, this needs to be addressed.
5. Ensure you are targeting the appropriate keywords for your business objectives. Just as successfull advertising campaigns contain content that appeals to a target demographic, successfull websites need to focus on keywords that have the highest relevance to their target audience.
The bad and the ugly
There are many techniques used to achieve high search results and the industry roughly splits these into two categories: Black Hat and White Hat.
Black Hat SEO referes the practice of deceiving the search engines to artificially boost your rankings. Its always been popular as a seemingly fast and easy way of achieving high results, not the merit of your content but by hoodwinking the search engines into belief that your content is relevant to that term. The good news for users is as soon as Black Hat techniques are advised, the search engines find the ways of spotting them and penalising sites that use them. Some examples of Black Hat techniques include:
- Gateway pages: Creating highly optimised pages targeting a particular search term, only to redirect the user to a completely different web page. Most search engines consider this practice highly dishonest and penalise offenders accordingly.
- Keyword Stuffing: Overuse of keywords in an attempt to trick search engines into thinking your content is more relevant than it is.
- Hidden content: Positioning large chunks of text off-screen or hidden using the same text colour as the background.
Real-time search
A recent development that is causing much excitement is the concept of real-time search. “As social networks have evolved, the idea of searching what people are writing on the internet right now has become a reality. The surge in popularity of Twitter is the core driver behind the wider acceptance of real-time search. Twitter’s search enables anyone to search what user are talking about on the web as it happens. As posts are made, they are instantly indexed and included in Twitter’s search. Initially, Twitter had the search facility at search.twitter.com, but in an indication of how the importance of real-time search has increased, its now available directly from the Twitter homepage.
Writing for SEO
When writing content for the web, it’s important to think about your audience. Every website is different, but by following a few simple guidelines you can produce content that’s friendly to both users and search engines. Apply this thinking to the following areas of content:
1. Friendly URLs: Boost SEO and make your URL easier to remember, improving user experience.
2. META description: Use the META description to provide a concise and accurate description of your content to entice visitors from the SERPS.
3. Page title: Choose a title that effectively communicate the topic.
4. Headings: HTML heading tags are used to structure your content. H1 is the most important tag and should be similar if not identical to your page title. Less important headings can use H2-H6.
5. Page content: The first 100 words of content carry more weight and should be used to provide a brief description of your content
6. Use of images: Choose a descriptive file name . Use the ALT attribute to describe images: for example ‘The perfect rich biscuit’. Provide an image caption to add content.
The future of SEO
The search engine landscape continues to become more complex and intriguing. The launch of new search engines such Wolfram Alpha and Bing; the partnership agrement between Microsoft and Yahoo; Google’s Caffeine’ updat; Facebook’s purchase of of FriendFeed. But what does this all mean for SEO? Do we need to develop advanced techniques to keep up with the advances in search technology? In a nutshell…no. Stick to the basics, create useful content, build on a accessible and adaptable platform, follow common sense and best practice when creating content and you will fare well.
Essentially, search engines are trying to behave naturally. If your site is more useful than your competitor’s and answers your user’s queries better, then its in search engine’s best interest to promote your site.
Tools to help you optimise
Here are a few of our favourite SEO tools and online resources to help you analyse your current SEO performance and imporve it further. With Google still dominating the UK market, we have focused on resources from and for this search engine. However, SEO should be considered a universal methodology applicable across all search engines.
Online Tools
Google’s Webmaster Tools: Get direct access to your Google diagnostics, descover site problems, crawl stats, find popular keywords and configure your XML sitemap.
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/
Google’s Keyword Tool: Google’ is official AdWords keyword research tool provides montly search volumes for keywords. Results can provide a great insight into what users are searching for and help you develop your website content accordingly.
https://adwords.google.co.uk/select/KeywordToolExternal
Google’s Insights for Search: With Google’s Insights for search, you can compare search volume paterns across specific regions, categories, time frames and properties.
http://www.google.com/insights/search/
SEO Moz Term Extractor: Check that your web pages are optimised for the correct keywords and search terms. This tool analyses the content of a given page and extracts the terms that appear to be targetted at search engines.
http://www.seomoz.org/term-extractor
Essential Reading
Google’s SEO Starter Guide: Straight from the horse’s mouth, the official guide on how to optimise your site for Google covers all the basics.
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/11/googles-seo-starter-guide.html
Google Webmaster Guidelines: Official Google guide providing top tips to help your site get indexed and ranked. Pay special attention to the ‘Quality Guidelines’, which detail misleading practices that could lead to your site being removed from the Google index.
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769
Blog Commenter Lite – Very useful SEO tool
I hope you found these SEO fundamentals information and tools useful.
Cheers
