SEO is an evolving study of the factors which search engines use to ‘rank’ you in their natural listings.

When we search for anything, up come the natural search lists. They’re in addition to the PPC lists. 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. The ‘natural’ listings are straight from the main index. They show sites listed in the order of importance and relevance – according to their algorithm.

We want to be right up there where we can be seen. No-one’s going to find us if we’re listed on page seven. It’s impossible to know about all the SE’s rank determining factors. 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. On the one hand there are SE’s purposely filing a wide array of new patents. Causing much mystification about their methods! On the other side you have an SEO industry. This utilises a series of tests and measurements to determine the most pertinent factors.

There are two sides to SEO: ‘On-Page’ factors & ‘Off-Page’ factors. Geography and demography are also factors that influence page ranking. For a full discussion of Off-Page factors, please refer to our other article on this subject.

‘On-Page’ SEO

This involves making your web pages ‘friendlier’ to the Search Engines. This is quite straight-forward – it simply requires correctly setting up your site. For instance: Seeding keywords in suitable places and at the correct density; internal-linking, using H1 & H2 header tags, and to a lesser extent, using meta-tags.

That might sound like gobbledy-gook, but don’t be alarmed!

The bottom-line is, that while it is the easiest to control, it has the LEAST affect on your ranking. To be blunt, some would say it hardly has any effect at all. In the past it was easy to affect Search Engines with on-page SEO. But that’s no longer the case.

If, however, off-page has been optimised, (and there are many inbound back-links), then on-page continues to be important. If that’s the case, internal linking and a certain amount of on-page fine-tuning can reap rewards.

Some Words Of Caution…

Do not START to SEO with phrases that yield millions of results. In a search for ‘Car Insurance’ on Google in the UK for example, you would find around 70 million results. Anyone can see it’s not wise to try and compete with 70 million other pages when you’re just starting out!

On the other hand… A much smaller list (300k) comes up when I enter ‘Southampton car insurance’. (Assuming I was a car insurance provider in Southampton.) So a much more realistic target.

I would have a far better chance of getting ranked for that phrase quickly than I would for just ‘car insurance’. In actual fact, it takes very deep pockets to get a premier listing for a term like ‘car insurance’. My competition would be the huge corporations. So not a great idea – especially, in fact, when there are much better ways to go about it.

In fact, what we really need are terms that more specifically reflect our product or service. In the industry, we call these ‘long-tail’ searches – as they contain multiple keywords. Depending on how competitive your market is, the phrases could be from 2 to 7 words long. Typically they will be 3 or 4 words long.

In general, our recommendation is to begin SEO’ing with keyword phrases that reveal fewer than 500,000 results. (There are occasions when we might accept a higher yield figure at the start – when the top entries are not well optimised.) Then, as we build back-links, we’ll automatically start to gain some ground on the bigger search phrases. If we’ve worked well, we can start hitting the bigger terms in a few months time. 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!

Don’t just limit building back links to your website’s home page – link them up to various sub pages as well. Google and the other Search Engines like this ‘deep linking’. Category or Product Group pages are a good example. These pages are usually linked to particular product pages. This means it can be very productive to drive search terms directly to them. Don’t just create back-links to your home-page. How your site’s pages are managed and listed is gaining more and more attention from Google, Bing and Yahoo.

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