CC Flickr Credit: Jonathanb1989

CC Flickr Credit: Jonathanb1989

Search engine Optimisation or as it’s known in the Industry SEO; until recently I’ve seen SEO as some mythical web voodoo that is not for the likes of meer mortals like you and I.

That’s not to say I’ve been carrying on with total disregard for making my websites search engine friendly. A lot of the stuff turns out to be common sense and by sticking to modern web practises, I’ve been doing most of the heavy lifting already. It’s just that there is so much to it, how do I advise clients and beginners on what they can do to improve their web presence “organically”?

Well after some serious swatting up, I now feel like I have a solid foundation of knowledge on which to share and build upon. Here are a few fundamental SEO tips to get you started.

Google is the biggest search engine. It’s a verb for Pete’s sake. Don’t know the answer? “Just Google it.” Yes there is Yahoo and Microsoft’s Bing etc but these lag so far behind they are a much smaller concern. For most people, Google is the web. And so when we talk about optimising our pages for search engines, we are manly talking about improving their ranking and frequancy in Google’s search results.

It’s true that Google has a super secret constantly evolving formula (algorithm) it uses to determine where your site will place in its rankings. It’s not all cloak and dagger though, a lot of information has been published and much discussed on the web as to how our websites can gain favour by the almighty spiders that Google lets loose on the web (think robots rather than arachnids).

Key Item 1 – Keywords

These are one of the most important factors in getting eyeballs onto your site. You need to pick relevant phrases that describe your product / service that real people are actually searching for. Plus you want to be as unique as possible; if there’s too much competition, then it’ll be much harder to stand ahead of the pack.

How can you find your keywords? One popular way is to use Google’s Adword tool. It was created to help you bid on advertising space with Google but that won’t stop us for what we want. You can of course buy keywords which can get you instantly to the top of google but its very short term and most people ignore these adverts (I personally have them blocked completely).

Stage One

Go to: https://adwords.google.co.uk/select/KeywordToolExternal

Set the targeting to your desired country e.g UK

Type in a word or better yet, a phrase you think is relevant to your site. At this point you can be broad.

e.g “Pet Products”

This generates a list of keywords including alternatives together with advertiser competition for that phrase, local and global searches. If you are just looking at the UK, focus on the local results.

e.g I can now see that a massive 27,100 people searched for “pet products” in October 2009 but a solid green bar tells me that competition is fierce so I probably need to be more specific.

Pick out any phrases you think are relevant, have a sizeable number of searches and have a competition size you are comfortable with. Repeat this process, aiming to narrow your focus as you go until you end up with a list of keywords and phrases that you are happy with. Once you have a sizeable list, its time to see what people are actually typing in to bring up these results.

Stage Two

Go to the Wordtracker keyword tool: http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com

Go through your list, enter in one keyword at a time and make sure that the things people are actually searching for are relevant to your website and adjust accordingly.

e.g From stage one I picked out the phrase “Pet Year” as a keyword that seamed relevant to a product on my site for novelty Pet Birth certificates – it was popular without much in the way of competition. Entering it in Wordtracker however, reveals that most people are actually searching for “Penthouse Pet of the Year” – these users might be a little disappointed if they arrived on my site.

Stage Three

What is the competition for these phrases? Put them into google one at a time and make a note of the top five websites that come up. These are your enemies and you must out smart them if you want to make it to a top search position.

Download Web SEO (Windows Only) from http://www.webceo.com/download – You will need to register but you can use it for free. This is a really cool programme that can analyse the Dickens out of a webpage and give you a good idea of why a website is doing well (or not) in the search rankings war. I’m only just getting into this programme but have a play, there’s plenty of eye opening reports it can generate for you and your competition.

Stage Four

Once you have your keywords its time to get them into your content as much as possible while maintaing relevant and engaging text (no mean feat). Be careful you don’t overdo this as you you could put visitors off, or worse, have them report you as spam.

Discuss these keywords with your web developer. He or she needs to ensure that these keywords are used in content headings, in url address for each page as well as titles, description tags for images and links etc.

If you have a website, you might want to check it validates. This is almost like a spell checker for the code that makes up the inner workings of your site. Too many mistakes in the code can mean your site gets penalised. Visit http://validator.w3.org/ to test the pages. If there are errors, ask your web guy what the deal is – there could well be a legitimate reason for some of the issues flagged up.

CC Flickr Credit: kennymatic

CC Flickr Credit: kennymatic

Key Item 2 – Page Rank

How important is your website? To you, it’s probably essential viewing but how does the rest of the world see it? Google assigns a Pagerank – a number out of 10 – to determine the importance (and therefore position) of one website vs another. To check a websites Pagerank, key it in at http://www.prchecker.info/check_page_rank.php

It’s all based on who is linking to you and what the Pagerank of that website is. Each website that links to yours on the internet is like a vote for your website. The more important the website, the more that vote counts. You could get hundreds of really small time websites to link to you but just one link to your site from one of the big boy websites like BBC.co.uk and your Pagerank will jump.

Work on getting your website better connected. This can come in the form of writing engaging, timely articles that are then shared on popular blogs or spread virally across social networks. Or you can actively request links from other websites. To find out who to approach, see who is linking to your competitors and peers and send a polite request.
To do a Google search to see whose linking to who type: www.name.com -site: www.name.com.

Don’t link to too many websites yourself, or you could actually dilute your own page rank. There is a special bit of code (rel=”nofollow”) that can be applied to stop this happening if you need to provide a long list of links.

Getting listed on directories can give you a quick and easy boost but that doesn’t mean the quality of visitor will be right for your site. After listing myself on freeindex.co.uk my personal site was inundated with offers from malaysian drug manufacturers who could enhance my personal life. I had to pass.

Key item 3 – Time and persistence

Bear in mind that getting good results in Google and then keeping that position is not an exact science and its going to take plenty of trial and error to get it right. There is no magic bullet and Google are forever adapting their algorithm. You can pay literally millions to get a good ranking but only hard work, persistence and relevance will keep you ahead of the pack.