SEO is essentially a constantly evolving study of what factors the search engines take into account when they ‘rank’ you in their natural search listings. These lists are the main results that are shown when you do a search. They’re different from the ads that companies have paid for. Pay Per Click adverts are generally sectioned off down the right hand side, with a couple across the top of the page. All the others are ‘naturally’ listed from the Search Engine’s index. Sites are graded by how relevant they are, and how important they are (according to the SE!).
Obviously, we want to be as high up the page(s) as possible. If we’re the 7th listing on page 9 then we’re hardly going to get prospects beating our door down! Nobody can be entirely certain about which factors Search Engines use in their ranking process. They keep it a closely guarded secret!
So as time has gone on, a sophisticated industry has evolved to get the most from the listings. On the one side you have SE’s like Google deliberately filing technology patents in many different areas. This causes mass confusion over which methods they use for ratings. Competing with this is the Search Engine Optimisation industry. SEO empirically measures and tests data to establish the more significant factors that the SE’s are using.
SEO looks at two different aspects – one is Off Page and the other is On Page. In addition there are geographic and demographic factors, but SEO cannot control these. To understand factors relating to off-page, please see our additional editorial.
Search Engine Optimisation ‘On-Page’
Making changes directly to website pages to make them more Search Engine friendly is what On-Page SEO is all about. This is the easy part and involves setting up your website ‘correctly’. Doing things such as: Using internal links, keywords, header tags and meta tags.
If all that is complete double-dutch to you, then don’t worry – you’re not alone! In reality, this is very easy to control, but not wildly effective. Indeed, it could be said to basically not have much influence at all. Previously we could make an impact with On Page configurations. That’s not how it is now though.
Having said that, if the website benefits from off page optimisation, then on page work should be looked at. When that’s happened, on-page factors can be optimised.
Things To Consider… A phrase that shows vast numbers of results should not be your first SEO target. ‘Car Insurance’ is a term to stay away from – unless you want to compete with 70,000,000 others! It’s not rocket science to realise that competing in this area wouldn’t be productive.
But… If I typed in “Southampton Car Insurance”, then there are only around 300,000 results. (Presuming that was my market). A big number still it seems – but actually quite a small number when it comes to web searches.
Now my chances are significantly improved. In actual fact, it takes very deep pockets to get a premier listing for a term like ‘car insurance’. I would actually be competing with the insurance conglomerates! Which is really not a good idea.
Therefore, we’re looking for phrases that yield less overall results – but quite accurately sum up what we do or what we offer. We call them Long-tail phrases, as they’re made up of a few particularly chosen keywords. Long tail can be anything from two to about seven words long. It depends on your competition. They’re usually around three or four.
In general, our recommendation is to begin SEO’ing with keyword phrases that reveal fewer than 500,000 results. However, if the websites at the top of the listings aren’t well optimised, we may stretch to a higher count. As our back links increase, we’ll start to rate more highly on the bigger search terms as well. If we put in enough effort, we can go after those big phrases in 3-12 months time. This line of attack starts with more focus. We go for the phrases that people who are looking to buy would use.
Don’t just limit building back links to your website’s home page – link them up to various sub pages as well. We call this ‘deep-linking’ – and Google in particular likes this. For example, build links to the pages that group products. That’s because pages like this generally have links to several individual pages. Do not simply build links to your website’s home page. Search Engines are increasingly focused on the individual pages within a website.
Written by Scott Edwards. Visit HERE or www.jasonkendall.co.uk.