Search Engine Optmisation

Search Engine optimisation, or SEO as it's commonly known, is an all encompassing term used to describe the various practices employed in improving your website's visibility on the web. There are many aspects to promoting your website's place in the search engine results. Some are internal aspects - i.e. they involve the actual content of your website, and how it works. Other aspects are external - i.e. they involve promoting your website via other means.

The Internal aspects of SEO will NEVER get you to the top of the search engines alone. Even the most basic and poorly constructed website can get to the top of Google provided it has enough high quality incoming links from other relevant websites.

This is a huge topic, and we are only going to briefly touch on the major areas, but hopefully it will give you a greater understanding of what is involved.

Snake oil alert

It has to be one of the first things we will say. There is a lot fo snake oil about, and a lot of carpet baggers in this industry. They prey on small businesses, promising the earth and delivering little, if anything. Don't fall prey to "we'll submit your site to a thousand search engines every month" offers. They are rarely worth it, at any cost. Once your website has been submitted to the big search engines, you will find the others will all pick it up automatically. It's totally unnecessary to keep submitting your website to Google - and in fact can have a negative effect!

Don't try and rule the world - keep it local

If you run a business selling car parts, and you don't have an advertising budget running into 6 figures forget trying to get to the top of google when people simply type in "car parts", as you will be competing against over 100 million other websites. Try and go for something like "car parts birmingham". You will be far more likely found in local searches like this.

Content is King!

Search engines love content. Lots of it, and content that changes often. A three page website that hasn't changed in the last year is not going to attract the search engines - or new customers! Search engines require plenty of content. More content means more keywords and phrases can be found in your website, and that means more people are going to find you!

Change your content regularly - or add to it. This doesn't need to be daily, but you should aim to make changes or add new pages of information every few weeks. Again, search engines know that a website that constantly changes is more likely to be topical and interesting for it's readers.

Meta Tags

Each web page has a number of technical attributes that don't all display on the screen, but search engines read and take note of. The page Title (which you do see at the top of the browser window), Keywords, Description and other meta tags relating to adult/family content, expiry time and so on, all go to provide valuable information to search engines, helping them to decide how to regard your website. You should always attempt to include the Keywords and some element of the Description tag in the viewable text on your website. This increases the Relevancy of the meta tags, and helps search engines decide what your website is really about.

Inbound links

Inbound links from other websites are valuable, but only if they come from websites that the search engines respect. Search engine companies aren't stupid. They know about the Link Building industry, and they won't reward you for having hundreds of inbound links from sites which are known to carry linking spam. Reputable Link Building companies will do the hard work for you - for a fee they will get your website URL into all sorts of useful places, and this will do a great deal to boost your website's position. Beware of people promising the earth for very little - even if they do provide hundreds of inbound links, if those links are from bad sites it won't help, or worse, may even harm your website's position - be warned!

If you want to start Link Building yourself, the easiest way is to fire up Google and start trying the kinds of search terms that you would like your website to appear in the results for. Then, go through the results, and every website you find which is not a competitor (e.g. forum sites, or trade associations, or business directories), go to that website, try and contact them and obtain a link to your website from theirs. This isn't cheap, and often means paying something, but this is the way it goes.

Search engine popularity snowballs over time. The more people know about you, the more likely it is that you may get mentioned in enthusiast or trade forums, sometimes with a hyperlink, and each time that happens, you've gained another inbound link for nothing! Just keep chipping away.