Search Engine Optimisation Guides – SEO Explained

What is SEO?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation and is the process of making a website / webpage more search engine “visible”, “friendly”, “keyword optimised” and “content optimised” (A search engine being Google, Bing or Yahoo, etc).

Ultimately the goal of SEO is to increase traffic (people viewing a website) through search engines results pages (SERP) to your website.

Natural search results (Organic) = Search engines listing you website in the natural results section at no direct cost to the website owner/s. See the image below for Google’s natural search results.

Paid search results (SEM/PPC) = Search engines listing your website in the “Sponsored Search Results” at the top and on the right of the search engine results page, commonly referred to as Pay-Per-Click (PPC).

See the image below for Google’s PPC area. SEO techniques can still be applied to SEM. See SEM Explained for more info on this.

Why bother with SEO?

• Imagine a user searches Google for “Laptop Repair”. On google.com there are over 17 million results for this. If your site is not listed on the first few pages then it is simply lost and you will not be getting a great deal of natural traffic to your site.
• If you want to get traffic to your site without paying for continued advertising and relying on people knowing your website address then every business MUST apply SEO to their site.
• It can be the make or break for a business. Recently I designed a new site for a local business. Their old site was not search engine optimised and they were not getting much business. During and after I created their new site I optimised all the pages. Now they estimate 95% of their business comes though Google search results pages.
• If you website is for a small business or a multi-national corporation, SEO should be viewed as a standard for the internet and how websites should be structured and setup. This applies to all websites in all countries.

Why SEO rather than SEM (“Search Engine Marketing” = Pay Per Click & Affiliate Marketing)?

This image was from a study to show where a persons eyes focus on a search engine results page. It shows that the natural search results are where the majority of people look to. This means that if you can get to the top of the natural results, you will generally be noticed the most

Small businesses with target areas and less competitive keywords can spend very little on optimising their websites and achieving brilliant results. The small business I mentioned above (that now has 95% of its sales through natural Google results) does not pay any monthly costs or pay per click costs, etc.

They simply have free target market visibility to their customers.

SEO Terms and Processes Explained

Search engine visible

By this we mean can the search engines see your site.

• Have you submitted the site to the search engine, has it picked the site up on another website (linking) and are there any factors preventing the search engine from not accessing and indexing the sites pages (“indexing” is the search engines way of putting a website in its records, therefore including the site in search results pages).
• There are certain ways a website might not allow a search engine to view it, e.g. adding a “”noindex,nofollow” meta tag (only in a html coded page) or maybe a “disallow” in the robots file. Also “nofollow” in links are becoming increasingly popular.

Search engine friendly

By this we mean has the website been made “browser friendly” and “search engine indexing friendly”.

“Browser friendly” -

• “cross browser checking” (does the website appear the same in all major web browsers, i.e. Internet Explorer, Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari, etc).
• “page loading times” (if a site takes 20 seconds to download it is not very friendly) and XHTML & CSS Validated (see http://validator.w3.org/ for XHTML and http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/ for CSS).

“Search engine indexing friendly” -

• Human and keyword recognisable URL’s (e.g. instead of having “www.spottedpanda.com/djdidm?d=ddmkscd” we would have “www.spottedpanda.com/seo-explained”).
• Having a clear site structure and hierarchy (a main or home page with links to categories and sections) – any page that you want to be visible on Google needs an internal link to it in your site.
• Title & META Tags – In the code of every webpage in the “HEAD” section there should be UNIQUE title and META tags for each page. “Robots” tag or file and a “sitemap” – usually in XML format.

Keyword optimised

By this we mean have you selected your keywords (a keyword being the word or phrase that someone types into a search engine, i.e. “Cheap iPhones”.

This can be the website name, product name, a service, etc. For example to find this site you may have typed in “Spotted Panda” or you may have typed in “SEO Information”.

After you have selected your keywords have you placed them in the content of your site, in the URL (website address), in the page title, the meta tags, the alt tags, etc.

Also if you can get the keyword into the website domain name (separated by hyphens) then this is always a plus – www.fridge-repair.com has a descriptive keyword in the title.

Content optimised

By this we mean to make the text content rich in information related to the keywords you have for the webpage. You content optimise for 2 reasons:

• The search engines algorithms are now cleaver enough to scan a webpage’s content (the main body of text) for the searched keywords and assess whether it is well structured and will be of interest to the user. They can tell if someone is trying to manipulate the algorithm by “keyword stuffing” and apart from not showing the site high on a search engine results page they may also blacklist you.
• For the benefit of the users coming to your site. The majority of web users want clear and informative webpage’s that get them what they want in the quickest time. Optimise your content for what they want to see and you’ll find the search engines will rate this higher.

Image and link optimisation

By this we mean having the following:

• Link Optimisation: Have the link text related to the content it is going to, i.e. instead of having a link as www.spottedpanda.com you should have “Digital Marketing Free Information”. They both go to the same place but the latter is optimised. If the keyword optimised content is not on your homepage, but a different webpage then the link should go to the webpage (not the homepage without the optimised content). Also the code in the link is important. Have the “anchor text” as a descriptive keyword relating to where the link is going.
• Image Optimisation: Apart from making sure images load quickly (scale the image, make it a jpeg or flattened png instead of a bitmap or fireworks png, etc) the alt text of the image should be related to the keywords on the pages content. Also if the image has a link then the above link optimisation should be observer (anchor text can be observed, but there is no link text because it is an image, therefore the this makes links better to be done in text rather than images – keep in mind for your menus).

Which search engine should you optimise for?

Very good question. 10 years ago it would have been Yahoo. Nowadays Google is on top so generally people optimise for Google and they find the rest will follow.

Google, Yahoo& Bing (formally MSN) all have “Webmaster Tools” where you can submit your site, along with a sitemap and robots file.

Also a link building campaign will get you site indexed (when a search engine re-scans an indexed site and they find a link to your website they will index it).

The obvious one to focus on is Google (unless you’re in China). In the USA 72% of online searches are done on Google, in the UK it is more like 85%. This does not mean forget about the others – you wouldn’t turn away the chance to market to 28% more customers – that could mean a 28% sales increase!

The Google domination may seem strange to many new users, as most computers bought will come with Microsoft Windows and Internet Explorer as the web browser, therefore Bing would be the default search engine. Google have been very clever in the marketing, name recognition and search engine algorithms that have made it so successful.