Search Engine Optimisation is an ever changing discipline. It works to maximise a website’s ratings on the ‘natural’ search lists on major Search Engines. The natural listings form the main body of a Search Engine’s pages. These do not include the paid listings. On the major Search Engines, you’ll see a box at the top, and a column down the right hand side. These are the paid adverts. Naturally listed adverts have been taken directly from the index. They show sites listed in the order of importance and relevance – according to their algorithm.

Clearly, the goal is to get to the top of the page. Nobody will know we’re there if we’re way down on page eight! No-one knows all the factors that Search Engines (SE’s) use to determine your rank. The SE’s really don’t want anyone to know – so you can’t manipulate or ‘game’ their system.

Nevertheless, an entire industry has evolved around Search Engine listings. So there are the Search Engines busily working on new systems on one side. This causes mass confusion over which methods they use for ratings. And to rival that, we have a large Search Engine Optimisation sector. This involves measuring various factors and doing empirical tests to establish the most important ones to target.

Search Engine Optimisation deals with both on-page and off-page issues. Geography and demography are also factors that influence page ranking. To understand factors relating to off-page, please see our additional editorial.

Search Engine Optimisation ‘On-Page’

It’s possible to change the pages of your website to make them ‘friendly’ to the Search Engines. It’s not too complex – it just requires setting your website up the right way. For instance: Utilising H1 and H2 Header Tags, Internal Linking, Keywords and Meta Tags.

If all that is complete double-dutch to you, then don’t worry – you’re not alone! It’s very easy to control on-page factors. But to be quite honest, they have the least relevance to your ranking these days. In truth, many argue its relevance has disappeared altogether! In the past it was easy to affect Search Engines with on-page SEO. That hasn’t been possible for a long time though.

The only time that ‘on-page’ becomes important is when you have taken care of ‘off-page’ and have a lot of inbound ‘back-links’. At that stage, Internal Linking and some On Page manipulation can be beneficial.

A Bit of Advice… A phrase that shows vast numbers of results should not be your first SEO target. For example, on Google’s Search Engine you’ll see 70 million listings in the UK for the term Car Insurance. It’s not rocket science to realise that competing in this area wouldn’t be productive.

But… When car insurance is prefixed with ‘Southampton’, it becomes a less intolerable three hundred thousand. (Only useful of course if these words describe my business.) This still seems quite a large amount, but it’s actually not in search terms.

The extended phrase makes all the difference. Trying to get a ranking for CAR INSURANCE would take a huge amount of time and money. My competition would be the huge corporations. Not the best way to do things at all!

It’s far better to choose phrases that are more specific to our offering. In SEO terms, they’re referred to as Long Tail Searches, as they include several relevant words. It depends on your competition, but long-tail searches can be up to 6 or 7 words. They’re usually around three or four.

We prefer to begin optimisation strategies with phrases that bring in less than five hundred thousand results. Sometimes we’ll consider higher counts if the top results are not benefitting from optimisation. Over time we’ll gain ground on the larger search terms. This will happen automatically through building back links. We can go for some of those after several months if we’ve SEO’d well. It’s a much more targeted strategy. Frankly, we’re only interested in the customers who are looking specifically for what we offer. There’s much more chance these people will buy!

Your home page isn’t the only place for back-links. Spread them liberally around your website. This technique is referred to as Deep Linking. For example, build links to the pages that group products. They often have links to several other sub-pages about individual products. Don’t just create back-links to your home-page. The SE’s are becoming increasingly interested in how a site’s individual pages are listed.